Stuart Mitchell, III President & CEO Pathstone

About seven years ago, CPA John Heveron, President of Heveron & Heveron CPA Firm, introduced him to Dragon Naturally Speaking, which was a major improvement over what Stuart had been using. "My issue is that I'm a poor typist," explains Stuart, "and the advent of email has overwhelmed my old way of handing off dictations to my assistant," necessitating a new system. Speech recognition software "is a wonderfully quick way of resolving my shortcomings," he says. Although he does still dictate documents to his secretary while traveling, he speaks documents and email responses using speech recognition at his desk. That includes summarizing meetings of his leadership and asset management team and distributing them, as well as responding to emails and dictating short memos internally to staff members and colleagues – "where formatting is less important." "I'm 200% faster with Dragon over typing," confirms Stuart, but in addition to improvements in speed and spelling, he has found other advantages. Because speech recognition is more efficient, users are more apt to provide more detail rather than less, says Stuart. "When you don't use Dragon, you often do not generally communicate all the points you meant to make," he has found. "The efficiency factor is huge." While Stuart is a long-time user of speech recognition tools, he says, "Speech recognition isn't complicated, but it does require training and Dana is a great teacher." And while he was willing to try speech recognition many years ago, Stuart claims he is anything but an early adopter. "I'm an active CEO and not a techie." Interview by Marcia Layton Turner, Layton & Co.