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Best practices: Dictation

Updated

To get the most accurate results from speech-to-text in Rad AI Reporting, it's important to follow a few key practices. These tips come directly from radiologists who use the system daily and have found what works best.

Whether you're just getting started or looking to improve your efficiency, these recommendations will help ensure your dictations are captured clearly and correctly.

 

Position the microphone properly

Hold the microphone at the corner of your mouth with the pickup rotated 90°—don’t speak directly into it.

 

Use a steady, monotone delivery

Dictate like a newscaster: consistent pace, even tone, no dramatic inflections.

 

Avoid pausing mid-sentence

Pause only at the end of a sentence to preserve context for the engine. A pause will trigger an end to the speech ‘segment’. 

This also applies to things like dates—for May 17, 2025, say “five seventeen twenty twenty-five” without pausing.

 

Use full-sentence context

If a word isn’t recognized, don’t repeat it or try to spell it phonetically—it rarely works. Instead, re-dictate the full sentence or back up a few words so the engine understands the full context.

 

Use punctuation

While Omni Box usually produces correct output even if you don’t dictate punctuation (e.g., “period”, “comma”), there may be instances where the lack of punctuation can lead to an unexpected result, such as a finding or recommendation landing in the wrong template field/picklist. 

Add punctuation while dictating to avoid errors. This ensures that Omni Box displays content with the correct and intended meaning.

Example: If you combine a finding and a recommendation into one long sentence, Omni Box may treat everything as a single finding.


❌ Without a period:
The dictation, “There is a 5 millimeter right upper lobe pulmonary nodule recommend follow up CT chest in 12 months”, results in the following report output:

  • NODULE: There is a 5 millimeter right upper lobe pulmonary nodule recommend follow up CT chest in 12 months
  • RECOMMENDATION:


✅ With a period:
The dictation, “There is a 5 millimeter right upper lobe pulmonary nodule. Recommend follow up CT chest in 12 months” results in the following output:

  • NODULE: There is a 5 millimeter right upper lobe pulmonary nodule. 
  • RECOMMENDATION: Recommend follow up CT chest in 12 months.
💡 For colon/GI, lumbar, or thoracic spine studies, the replacement is suppressed so that anatomical mentions such as "the colon is unremarkable" stay verbatim.

 

Set up substitutions to reduce repetitive phrases and edits

If you find yourself dictating the same phrases or correcting the same formatting issues over and over, you can create substitutions (auto‑replace rules) so the system handles those changes automatically. Substitutions are applied after the speech engine finishes processing your dictation. Learn how to use substitutions.

Example: If you notice that "Fleischner" is regularly transcribed incorrectly as "Fleissner", you can create a substitution. 

 

Adjust microphone settings for your environment

You can adjust microphone settings for your specific environment. 

  • Control when the microphone records your voice with Push to Talk (PTT) mode, which can be helpful in noisy environments.
  • Add a delay if your speech is getting cut off with the Microphone off delay setting.

For details about these and other settings, see "Configuring microphone settings."

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