Tag Archives: bighand

General Legal IT

Bighand for Windows Phone 8

4 Comments

I tweeted about this last Friday but thought I would expand on that in a short blog post. All the naysayers can c0ntinue to knock Microsoft’s mobile platform, the refuseniks can refuse to educate themselves about the platform and confuse it with the old Windows Mobile platform. But it’s harder to keep this up as the Windows Phone ecosystem slowly chips away at the smartphone market, from taking the third spot from BlackBerry to overtaking the iPhone in emerging markets.

But it’s the emerging trend for key apps to appear on the platform for me that is the best sign of the platform being taken seriously. And the Legal IT space is a case in point as Bighand are about to release their mobile dictation product for Windows Phone 8.

It’s been redesigned to take advantage of the Windows Phone “Metro” interface. The app is designed to take your phone’s theme and match itself to it, both in style and colour scheme.

bighand1

All the key functions are available from the opening screen (as shown below) with record dictation as a wide tile at the very top.

bighand2Each of the tiles below (to show all dictations, unsent dictations etc) can be pinned to your home screen where each one would act as a live tile giving you instant updates as to how many dictations are at what stage.

Going into these tiles gives a very familiar look to a Windows Phone user, care has been taken throughout the app to ensure the user experience is close to what you would expect within the platform.

bighand3And the screen for dictating has been “flattened” to ensure it feels “Windows Phone” like.

bighand4bighand5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ability to attach photos to the dictation is added here as well, allowing you to take a snapshot of a receipt or note and send it with the dictation. The dictation can then be profiled if this is turned on within your Bighand set up, the dropdowns for these are pulled from the server.

bighand6

Overall this app is both great for Windows Phone and a great bonus for Bighand who now will support all four main mobile platforms!

 

Share
General Legal IT

BigHand user conference 2013 – Manchester

1 Comment

Last Wednesday (13th Feb) I attended the Bighand user conference in Manchester. First off a big hand for Bighand, finally a vendor puts in a lot of effort to hold a quality user conference outside of London and well done to the firms that turned out and made it a successful event!

I like the Bighand events, they have a good mix of general business/legal keynotes, product information and specific breakout sessions. It’s like what Interwoven used to do with their Gear Up conferences, but sadly no longer do under either their Autonomy or HP guises.

The keynotes on Wednesday were from Dame Sarah Storey and Neil Rose (Legal Futures). Dame Sarah’s talk was about her journey as an athlete which was fascinating, a Paralympic who’s won gold medals in two sports. Neil had to follow with a talk on ABS’s (Alternative Business Structure) which wasn’t quite the talk of an olympic athlete but was a great introduction to ABS’s in the legal world. One point I noted mid talk was when he was discussing a firm in Silicon Valley that offered advice in a relaxed coffee shop atmosphere, lawyers like “Apple genius'” in the jumpers with the firms logo on. It caused a chuckle in the audience which to me shows how far the UK has to go to rid itself of its stuffy suited image and really embrace new business models.

Next up was the product information and below I’ve written up the key product take aways that I noted:

First off were some mobile offerings:

FreeMe was a dictation app for iPads, built from the ground up rather than a port of the iPhone app. As well as the obvious dictation functionality it allowed iPad “open in” functionality from emails that then open the attachment in FreeMe for review with dictation controls on screen, to allow you to dictation notes to send back to BigHand.

Then it was the turn of their new BlackBerry 10 App. When this was announced I thought it was an odd launch. After all BigHand hadn’t launched a Windows Phone 8 App yet, a platform that was released some months ago. “But it’s a small market share” I hear you say, very true but the BBX platform has zero market share at the moment. My guess is RIM (or BlackBerry as I guess we should call them now) encouraged enterprise app developers to produce BBX apps for launch, something Microsoft really should have done! But it’s all a moot point as it was mentioned that a Windows Phone 8 app is in the pipeline from Bighand.

Next up was some info on Bighand 4.4 for the desktop:

Here we have some nice integration with Lync to show presence information when sending dictations. Handy if you need to ensure you send to someone who is available.

For the speech recognition module there were a couple of new wizards demoed. One that helps you to set the optimal recording levels for your microphone and another for training your voice to the system.

Last up was some work Bighand are doing on workflow. Integrating WorkSite and Speech Recognition into one workflow. You right click in FileSite, select dictate, it auto profiles the dictation with data from WorkSite and then once you finish the dictation and document are linked together for future reference. It’s a shame I didn’t photo the slide as it shows it much better than I can describe it (maybe if someone from Bighand is reading this they can send me on the slide?).

The afternoon was set aside for the BigHand breakout sessions. I attended a couple, one on speech recognition for which Charles Christian tweeted a nice summary “is speech recognition a marmite technology – some love it & some hate it“. Then one on mobile device management, led by MobileIron. The take away here was that BigHand are developing their mobile apps against MobileIron’s app management API’s to allow you to manage and control their app using the popular MobileIron platform. I hope they will also look at the Citrix app management platform next and provide a BigHand mdx for use in the Citrix platform!

Overall a good day. Thankfully my exit from the conference was timed perfectly as I missed the spectacle of Big Mills in lycra at the very end!

Share
General Legal IT

“Siri, will speech recognition ever take off in Legal?”

1 Comment

Last week I attended the Bighand user conference at the excellent Renaissance Hotel in St Pancras (take note certain legal IT company whose only user event I attended the previous week). Rather than write up a review of the whole day (there’s a good one here if you’re interested) I thought I’d comment on an item that was high on the days agenda.

Speech Recognition.

Now before I get accused of following certain people or the current trend generated by SIRI let me first point out item #1 on this blog post of mine from the 1st January 2010!

But the feeling I got from the conference is that finally the tech, that has been around in Legal ever since I’ve been in this vertical, is finally reaching a point that it is useable. The latest version of the Bighand product (4.2) uses the new Nuance 11 engine and from the demo shown on the day is impressive (demo online too). The workflow with transcribe and proofing seems ideal and the tools given to the secretary to control the dictation playback with the resulting document for amendment is well thought out. I seem to recall in a previous Bighand session that this correcting by the secretary would help with the teaching of the speech recognition software for that author (I could be wrong on this one so check with Bighand first!)

With a bit of work with the API that Bighand now provide you could create a great Fee Earner interface from the DMS (document management system) that would ensure the document being created is started on the correct template, filed in the right place and transcribed ready for a secretary to finish the document.

There were some good case studies from law firms who had started to use speech recognition. Stating that the transition wasn’t difficult for existing Bighand users, but the lawyer had to want to embrace the technology (due to the initial time taken to teach the system and perhaps having to adapt dictation style for better results). Also feedback was not that this led to reduction in secretaries (those lawyer-secretary ratios were high enough already!) but to enabling the secretaries to do other work for the lawyer.

The key point that stood out from the day though were some comments generally on the technology. For a while I’ve thought that maybe dictation was a dying technology, after all the “younger” lawyer is used to typing his/her own documents right? Well this generation maybe, but the next generation is growing up with the likes of SIRI. Maybe this generation is a blip before lawyers throw themselves back at dictation and with the advances in the technology maybe speech recognition is now a viable solution to both improve efficiencies and to make those straining lawyer-secretary ratios work!

Share
General Legal IT

Another breakfast with BigHand

3 Comments

Last week I attended one of the Bighand regional roadshows, held again at Gordons LLP in Leeds (I so wish other Legal IT vendors would do these local visits, why should the customer travel down to London all the time?).

I came away thinking there wasn’t much new in the latest releases. But then I guess that’s what a good piece of software should do, tweak a little but don’t add so many features that you ruin the core thing your software does well.

But there were a few new “tweaks”, some of which I’ve highlighted below. The information here is from my notes rather than any official press release, so if you like the look of a feature you may want to check with Bighand rather than trust my note taking! (For info, the notes were taken using the excellent OneNote app on the new Windows Phone 7, which auto syncs with the OneNote webapp via Microsoft’s SkyDrive. I’m drafted this blog post using said webapp on my PC and am finishing off using OneNote in Office 2010 – all integrated beautifully!).

New in v4 of Bighand.

Profiling

Profiling is available in v4. Similar to how a DMS (Document Management System) profiles documents you can do with your dictations. This then builds up title (saving the lawyer typing up a random title). This profile information can be populated from other systems e.g. Client matter information from the practice management systems. This profile information is then available in the BlackBerry client also.

Practice builder

An additional product that allows for a “drill down” interface as the starting point to get into your dictation. You select your client, “drill down” to the relevant matter and then start the dictation. It’s all about trying to make it easier to build a title without need to type it all in.

At the moment an xml file is used to populate the profile and “drrill down” information. But they say they are looking at a SQL connector in later releases.

Workflows

These have been expanded to allow multi-step workflows. For example, before a dictation is routed through to the secretary it could go through speech recognition and then a proofing step. It makes more use of the “attach file” functionality, allowing a much more complex (and useful?) workflow to be built. There are plans to look at hooking in 3rd party steps, although an SDK for the workflow is not yet on roadmap so it’s early days in the thinking.

Bookmarks

A small but pretty neat addition is allowing the adding of bookmarks at points in the dictation. So a fee earner could, for example, add a bookmark to ask their secretary to check a name as they’re dictating. Or a secretary could add things to clarify with the fee earner. This bookmark information is displayed in the application as each bookmark is passed when playing the dictation. It could be very useful in conjunction with the new multi step workflows.

Send anywhere

This function allows you to send a dictation to any secretary or department without the need to add a specific workflow to do it. It can still be configured to how you want.

There is also the ability to easily set dictation to confidential without need to set up specific options for this. This goes straight to the assistants folder. If a co-ordinator can see that particular workflow they would only see an item titled “confidential dictation”, but they would not be able to open it.

 

Improvements in speech recognition

The average processing time that Bighand see for 10min dictation on standard specification server is about 6mins (although there was feedback from the room that a firm using speech recognition was seeing processing that was a lot quicker – and they were just running on high power desktop. They were seeing a 30min dictation being processed in 2mins).

Other information Bighand gave was:

  • They fed back that they now have about 1000 customers using speech recognition now.
  • You can spread speech recognition across multiple servers for improved performance, but it does require its own server.
  • Typically it takes about 20-30mins of dictations to get it to learn your voice. There is an addin to Word where corrections are applied, which are then fed back to the system.
  • Works with a number of non English languages. Those mentioned were: German, Dutch, French, Spanish. There is a Legal dictionary available in some.
  • It was mentioned that it requires good training on how to dictate. Requires consistency in volume, consistency in how you dictate etc otherwise get worse recognition rates.

Pre-learning tool

They showed a new addition to speech recognition, the pre-learning tool. This can look at last 7 days of your dictations. You can then play these and paste the doc you produced from the dictation into this tool. This then trains the speech recognition from previous work to your voice. Benefits here are that it would allow a secretary to feed the pre-learning tool on behalf of the fee earner.

Mobility

Main news here was that an Android client is now available. And in the BlackBerry application there are extra functions in email. Allows you to jump from an email straight to dictate, then when you send the dictation it includes the email from where you triggered the dictation.

iManage integration

There is now a bighand dictation option available on right click of folder within Desksite/Filesite. This then populates the profile in bighand and knows where to create document. It attaches an nrl link to the dictation.  Basically uses the SDK that is available to use. Extra licence through for the SDK.

There was also mention of an addition of client side speech recognition for v4.1, I didn’t take too many notes on this as I see the server side solution as a much better option. Although for small firms the cost benefit of a server-less solution may be better.

 

Share
General Legal IT

Breakfast with BigHand

1 Comment

On Thursday myself and a couple of colleagues attended a breakfast briefing from BigHand at Gordons law firm in Leeds, accompanied by plenty of bacon butties from the Roast! It was one of a number of briefings that they are doing throughout the UK on the back of their recent acquisition of nFlow.

As well realising that it’s not just Herbies that have hot meeting rooms, there was information on the nFlow acquisition. But for the most part we were shown demos of some of the new features being planned for future versions of the BigHand software (I think most were for v3.4). Below are some of the key functions that stood out for me (I was making notes on my touch screen Windows Phone whilst trying to keep up with the demos, so if you’re interested in a specific feature I’d double check my understanding with BigHand!)

  • MS Office Integration. This allows a document to be attached to the dictation and passed through the workflow. Also there is the the ability to create and manage profile information to go with the dictation. These combined allow the Fee Earner to provide information to the secretary on the dictation that the system can then use to, for example, launch a template and fill in details such as document name straight from the dictation in the queue.
  • Then combine this with the SDK and you could enable integration into the DMS (Document Management System) to transmit the document in the dictation workflow, yet maintain the security and version control of the DMS.
  • Escalation function. The ability to set global rules in the system to escalate work. So for example a folder could be given a rule that after a certain time all outstanding dictations are moved to another folder (e.g. out of hours team or the team in the firms Asian offices for example).
  • Reporting has been bolstered by the addition of an analytics module. This stores more information than before in the database (no longer limited to last 30 days) and has improved reporting (no longer using Excel). The module allows you to drill down on results obtaining more detail.
  • In the mobility clients for BlackBerry and iPhone you now have the ability to attach documents and photos to dictations. Taking the devices further into general workflow than just pure dictation (e.g. you could dictate meeting notes that referred to notes on a whiteboard that you’d photographed on the phones camera)
  • Finally the speech recognition module. This was brought in with v3.3 but it’s worth a mention again as it still impresses me. It’s way beyond the old desktop versions, but the addition in the newer version is the ability to chose to either send the transcribed document back to yourself for proofing or send it onto your default workflow for proofing. So the “training” can be done by a secretary checking and correcting your document.

The briefings are still being run, details can be found on their site.

Share
General Legal IT

Give them a bigHand!

Leave a comment

Sorry, I know that’s a terrible pun!

A warning, this is a bit of a techie post. So for the non-IT readers of the blog, a summary of the post:  “if more vendors/suppliers did what bigHand do in their software design your IT department could upgrade software or change the settings for you much faster!”

On with the post…

As firms grow in size there are a number of IT challenges that can become more and more difficult due to the additional numbers. One of these challenges is those “small” upgrades to get to the latest version that seem to lengthen exponentially with the number of extra desktop PC’s supported. This also goes for changing the configuration or settings of those software applications. Especially when you want to alter a setting that is located locally on the PC (for example, iManage FileSite holds a lot of it’s client settings/configuration in the local PC registry, whereas with Workshare it’s in an XML file on the PC).

bigHand though seem to have a different approach.

At the moment we’re looking at an upgrade of our bigHand digital dictation installation to v3.2.3 and because of this I spent Tuesday on a technical training course for the new version. During the course we went through the client configuration.

And in bigHand for the most part these can be set using roles in the central database. This means they’re very simple to change instantly and also means you can simply manage different configurations for different people. All this can be done without the need to deploy patches, upgrades or do any amendments on the desktop PC.

Other settings for things like drivers to use for microphones can be managed using group policy using the bigHand provided administrative template file (.adm files). Again no mucking about on the desktop PC.

Simple and brilliant!

So if you need to disable a menu option for all the users? Simple! Just amend the role and apply once centrally! This makes upgrades easier as well as your client deployment can be a simple default install without the need to heavily customise for all those specific settings (especially if you have one configuration for fee earners, one for secretaries, one for support staff etc etc).

Share