Hal Carter

Vice President of Legal Affairs

Rochester Genesee Regional Transportation Authority

Early in his career, attorney Hal Carter found that the most efficient way to create legal documents was to dictate text into a dictation machine for his assistant to transcribe. When he heard about speech recognition software in the 1990s, he recognized the potential to eliminate a step in the document creation process. So he tried it. "It was very frustrating," he says, so he stopped using it. But he decided to try again in 2002, when computing power had caught up to the software's capabilities, and has been using it consistently since then.

Today, 70 to 80% of Carter's work is done using Dragon Naturally Speaking software. In fact, "I don't have the patience to type anymore," he admits. Talking into a microphone connected to his computer is that much faster, he has found. "It's definitely much more efficient."

After four years of continuous use, Carter is an advanced speech recognition user. Still, he continues to try and improve his productivity. For example, he went to an advanced user course at Achieve Results and learned the power of creating his own commands as well as tricks for keeping his Dragon program running more quickly and accurately.

In his quest for improved productivity, Carter has had many occasions to ask for help from Achieve Results. "Their responsiveness and service is wonderful," he says.  When he needed help in moving the program from one computer to another and simultaneously upgrading from version 8.0 to the newer version 9.0, "Achieve Results was there to help overcome every difficulty."

Dragon has become an integral part of Carter's work process, handling the creation of everything from email to documents to Excel spreadsheets. "I really do use it for everything," he says.
efficient."