Dr. Szalados was an early adopter of speech recognition software, having been trained by Achieve Results in 2001, when it was relatively new technology, he says. In 2001, Dr. Szalados was regularly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of medical record documentation, memos, letters, emails, and teaching material that he had to generate daily in his role as the vice-chair for the department of anesthesiology, co-director for adult critical care, and medical director of the operating rooms at the University of Rochester.

"Trained first as a physician, I'm not a very good typist" Dr. Szalados readily admits, and the old process of dictating letters or chart entries, handing them to a secretary or transcriptionist, then waiting to receive the documents back for review, and then sending them back again for correction and filing seemed overly torturous and inefficient.

Fast forward eight years and "[Dragon] is now a mainstay of my life," says Dr. Szalados. He relies so heavily on speech recognition technology that "it's hard to imagine life without it." Dr. Szalados uses the technology in his medical, legal, and administrative roles to work smarter, accomplish more, and still find time to relax.

Yes, while practicing medicine full time, Dr. Szalados earned a law degree from the University at Buffalo. Speech recognition made "taking notes from voluminous legal textbooks, generating study outlines, and writing term papers a breeze." "Speech recognition was the greatest study tool," he affirms. Being able to dictate important passages from law books into Dragon, merge them with class notes, and then print out a comprehensive overview of the entire class at semester's end gave him a significant advantage at test time. "I had the best notes in class!"

In addition, Dr. Szalados is the author of more than one hundred articles and other publications. "I do it for the satisfaction it gives me and speech recognition allows me pursue my writing interests with a stack of papers on my lap, a cup of coffee in my hand, and my feet on the desk."

Now, when working as a critical care physician, Dr. Szalados has found that being able to speak his medical chart notes into Dragon is more natural, saves time, and improves patient care. He frequently finds himself discussing competing judgment calls and observations that he might not have taken the time to painstakingly write or even type out. Those medical notes are extremely valuable to other members of the medical care team, who can access them quickly and easily almost immediately after he dictates them. "I believe that I have set a new standard for medical documentation in this community by using Dragon speech recognition."

In the document-intense world of his law practice, Dr Szalados uses speech recognition to generate correspondence and also to synthesize large volumes of medical records into a more manageable and legible document – similar to how he used the technology in law school.

"It's a productivity tool," Dr. Szalados summarizes. "The more efficient you are, the more you can get done in a short period of time; in this case it's definitely about efficiency but it's also about adding a level of quality to the final product that is a bonus derived from this technology" For Dr. Szalados, Dragon speech recognition has made it possible to enjoy multiple careers simultaneously and also find time to enjoy free time.