June 30th, 2025 and OM System not so quietly release an update to ODMS Cloud during the last day of the Australian Financial year.
When the release jumped from v1.1.1 to v2.0.0 we knew something big was happening. Then digging into the release notes for the ODMS Cloud mobile app, the ODMS Desktop application on the Windows store and the 200+ page newly updated ODMS Cloud reference manual it was clear what OM System had been up to - ODMS Cloud Speech Recognition.
Speech Recognition is pretty big news on its own. But, also snuck in, a sudden backflip on compatibility with some old and still widely used Olympus dictaphones (ie DS-5000 which was released in 2008 and DS-7000 released 2012 along with some intermediate models like the DS-3500 and DS-3400). Plus to top that off, in comes compatibility with the Philips DPM8000 model dictaphones. Note though that this compatibility is only with the ODMS Desktop application for Windows in this release, Mac left behind again for now.
As at the time of writing we have no information on the Speech Recognition capability itself other that what is in the ODMS Cloud reference manual, although users will likely cotton on fairly quickly when they see the new Speech Recognition column in their ODMS Cloud dashboard and Speech Recognition tick box in their workflows.
From what we can gather reading through the ODMS Cloud reference guide, speech to text will be processed by Azure AI Speech and will provide to transcription typists both the transcribed audio and the audio itself. A change to the ODMS Desktop application will highlight the words spoken in the transcribed document as the audio is played back making it much faster and easier to turnaround transcriptions.
To get access to Speech Recognition an additional licence will be required, we have no information on the licence costs as yet. Stay tuned for more when we get it.