Speech Blog

The job description for a police officer in the eyes of society has always been to protect and serve individuals, families, and property-business owners. What a vast majority of society is unaware of is the fact that police officers spend a great deal of time doing everything but that. Officers spend two thirds of their time organizing documentation for court cases, filling out paper work, and providing testimony in court. An officer‘s ability to put together and gather effective documentation can determine a cases success. Therefore, productivity and efficiency is paramount to law enforcement officers. Being able to start a report by recording incident notes when they are still fresh in mind has proven to improve efficiency as well as report accuracy.

Voice technology can be useful to law enforcement agencies in many ways:

Managing Paperwork

Law enforcement often involves filling out considerable amounts of paperwork. This can be a time-consuming and difficult part of the job. With voice recognition software, officers can input entire reports at a rate of 130 words per minute, or more. This can make it easier to handle large amounts of paperwork. Files can also be automatically digitized, making them easier to retrieve later.

Reducing Costs

In some cases, police in the field will dictate information, which then has to be transcribed. With voice recognition for law enforcement, these transcription costs — and the time it takes to transcribe documents — can be reduced greatly. Transcription can be near-instantaneous with the use of speech recognition software. A report from the field can be made available to officers and personnel almost immediately. Speech recognition can also help to reduce the need to hire more people to keep up with the workload. The more reports that need to be written and the more paperwork that needs to be filed, the more staff needs to be brought on board. By reducing the amount of time it takes to transcribe documents, dictation software can help reduce the number of staff needed in a department, reducing taxpayer burdens and making a law enforcement department more streamlined and efficient.

Saving Time

Sharing information and reducing the time it takes to get information from one department to another can save lives in law enforcement. With speech recognition software, it’s possible for law enforcement to quickly complete reports and documents can be submitted quicker.  It reduces typing time and more importantly frees up officers to pursue their work out on the streets.

Supporting Mobility

Today, law enforcement and police personnel may travel long distances to work cases. They may need to pool resources with multiple team members across departments, or even across the country. Sharing information, and being able to get real-time information on-the-go may be essential to working on a case. With connected voice technology, it’s possible to record reports and fill out forms on-the-fly, ensuring information is available when needed — no matter where it’s needed. In addition, team members share voice files and reports through mobile devices and computers, ensuring everyone on the team has the information they need.

Improving Quality

When police have more time to complete reports because typing doesn’t take as much time as before, they can polish their reports a little more. Speech recognition can also take care of typos and misspellings, which can occur when information is entered manually. In some cases, software will even enter punctuation automatically, reducing grammatical errors that can make some meanings unclear. In law enforcement and legal fields, inaccurate or incomplete information can be devastating. It can lead to liability issues, unsolved crimes and other problems. Speech recognition software accuracy is constantly improving and allows law enforcement staff to correct rather than type entire documents resulting in fewer errors.

Increasing Efficiency

Law enforcement professionals have laptops in their cruisers. Unfortunately, there’s no way to use these computers safely while driving. Speech recognition allows law enforcement to type, find GPS information and perform other tasks while the cruiser is in motion — all without needing to pull over or delay responding to a call.

While they realize reports are part of the job, most public safety officers simply aren’t big fans of paperwork. They would rather be out in the community doing the “real” police work – patrolling neighborhoods, enforcing road safety, or tracking down leads – that they were trained to do. But the paperwork can be overwhelming, especially when you consider that it can take more than an hour to type up a single incident report. Voice productivity enables officers to create documents a lot faster – whether they’re at their desks or out on patrol. Paperwork can be completed with unprecedented speed and ease so they have more time to focus on the most important aspects of law enforcement.

If you have any questions or would like to know what solution would work best for you, leave a comment and let us know!