Remember the days of the typing pool? Sadly, not many of us have experienced the luxury of dictated letters being sent down to this hive of activity and having a beautifully typed manuscript returned. With the advent of the PC, word processors and e-mail decentralising the entire process we have become ‘empowered’ to produce our own correspondence. Even those with allocated secretaries are becoming rare, so ringing in and dictating a letter is not always a possibility.
On the plus side, this has lead to a vast improvement in general typing skills and most of us can rattle off an e-mail or letter in a decent amount of time. However, the major increase in repetitive strain injury among computer users is costing UK business more than £1bn every year through loss of working hours, according to the TUC. Coupled with the fact that over 100 workers have to stop work permanently every week, we are facing a very real problem. This along with the increase in quality and power of desktop machines means that the adoption of voice recognition software has increased albeit not dramatically.
