Nuance, Nexgen team to ease first responders’ reporting burden

Ensuring that the performance between Nuance and Nexgen would be user-friendly was a priority for the companies, according to Geremia.

“We put them together to make sure that it’s seamless for the officer,” he said. “You don’t want to have them install two completely different systems and then have them not work nicely together.”

Annunziato agreed, noting that effective ease of use is particularly important, because many public-safety entities that tried speech-recognition solutions in the past did not have good experiences.

“When the technology started to unfold, many the departments bought a system that really didn’t have much functionality to it,” Annunziato said. “The Nexgen RMS, CAD and mobile system was developed for cops, so it’s very intuitive. The ease of using the RMS system with the Nuance voice-recognition system takes it to a whole other level.

“A lot of departments years ago bought an application that did not work, so they’re very leery. Even when we begin to demo this product, it’s blowing their minds with the ease of functionality for them.”

Geremia said public-safety agencies use a host of different RMS and CAD solutions, each of which often are customized to meet specific agency or local needs—a situation that is a familiar one to Nuance Communications officials.

“At Nuance, we’ve been around a very long time, and we have a very large healthcare side of our business,” Geremia said. “The way I explain it to my CEO and our board is, ‘This [law-enforcement sector] is where healthcare was 10 years ago—there are so many people doing different things. Consolidation is coming, and regulations are coming.

“Sharing of information just doesn’t happen today, Don’t get me wrong, it’s starting to, but it’s nowhere close to where it should be. That’s where these records-management systems being at the middle of it all—they’re the database, they’re the meat of it. Dragon’s just making it easier for these systems to be used and get better-quality reports.”