We recently caught up with Beth Thompson, Director of Sales at BigHand, one of the leading providers of voice productivity technology, including their recently launched app for BlackBerry 10. Check out the Q&A below to see what she had to say on the app, how voice dictation can help increase business productivity, and what the future holds.

Biz Blog: Hi Beth, thanks for joining me today. Can you briefly describe the functionality of the BigHand app and the underlying enterprise workflow platform?

Beth Thompson: BigHand’s dictation app enables professionals to dictate directly into their smartphone from anywhere and submit verbal instructions, memos, requests, and documents to office-based support staff. From there, the submitted voice files enter a workflow that is based on the organization’s operations, whether it’s directed to an office assistant or to a centralized working pool.

What cost or time saving benefits does this provide to businesses, or specific industries in particular? Can you include an example of a typical workflow?

We have over 170,000 users worldwide, with a particular focus on the legal marketplace. With law firms facing stiff competition and pressure to reduce costs, they look for technologies like BigHand to help streamline their operations. Our technology helps firms leverage existing support staff while streamlining the document production process. Not to mention, saving lawyers significant time by allowing them to using their voice to get more done, from anywhere in the world. They use our dictation app for recording billable time, memos, and verbal tasks or if they are stuck in traffic for a couple hours, they can submit all of their work verbally. They can also attach photos to recorded dictations if they are out on-site.

A typical workflow would include a lawyer who records a dictation via their BigHand dictation app which sends it through to their assistant. The assistant can choose to have the dictation go through a speech recognition engine, significantly reducing the amount of time they will have to spend on transcribing the dictation or transcribe directly from the dictation. The lawyer can then track the progress of the submitted work, and also receive the completed document back via their smartphone. Most of the time it’s finished by the time they get back to the office.

Voice dictation as a concept has been around for quite some time. How has it shifted as smartphones were introduced?

We all dictate every day, we just call it voicemail. As consumers begin to embrace voice-to-text technologies, they begin to realize that talking is faster than typing. So the benefits are significant in that professionals, such as lawyers, can save time by sending a dictation vs. typing or leaving a voicemail that can’t be tracked.

BigHand is a great example of a native BlackBerry 10 app. Can you share your thoughts on the experience of developing for the BlackBerry 10 platform?

Our longtime relationship with BlackBerry has helped BigHand bring some of the first enterprise mobile dictation apps to the legal marketplace years ago. The new BlackBerry 10 app is a continuation of that relationship and reinforces BigHand’s commitment to providing first-to-market productivity apps for busy professionals as well as continuing to support our large mobile application user base that utilizes BlackBerry devices.

What does the future hold for BigHand? Can you give us any sneak peeks into upcoming features that you’d like to build into the app?

We are hoping to integrate the entire document production process into the app, from dictation to document approval.

Thanks again Beth!

Be sure to head over to BlackBerry World to download the client app for free on your BlackBerry 10 smartphone. For the full advanced features, you’ll need to register for a BigHand account; get the details at www.bighand.com.

How would a voice dictation workflow system improve your productivity at work? Share in the comments below.

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Building a Strong BlackBerry Enterprise Developer Community

Cisco, SAP, Box, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Truphone, and BigHand are just some of the companies whose applications, used daily by millions of customers worldwide, are available on the BlackBerry 10 platform.

“The developer community for enterprise and government has been incredible in the support of BlackBerry 10,” said Derek Peper, Vice President, Enterprise Partnerships, BlackBerry. “The community sees the potential of the BlackBerry 10 platform to help individuals and organizations make the shift from mobile communications to mobile computing, and have stepped forward with powerful, dynamic and user-friendly applications that are designed to empower employees around the globe.”

BlackBerry made a significant commitment to developers for BlackBerry 10, making it fast and efficient for organizations to develop and manage applications. Developers were provided with toolkits that included the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK with Cascades to create graphically rich, high performance native apps in C/C++ or the Qt Modeling Language (QML); and the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK for HTML5 developers, allowing them to create native-like apps using common web programming technologies (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript).

BlackBerry launched BlackBerry Partners for Enterprise in 2012 to succeed the BlackBerry Alliance program and increase support to the enterprise software and services community. BlackBerry also rolled out the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour – Enterprise Edition to 11 cities to help enterprise application developers and partners develop for or port existing applications to BlackBerry 10.

What Partners are Saying

“We’re proud to extend Cisco’s WebEx technology to the BlackBerry 10 platform letting customers of any size join, start, view content, and stay connected to WebEx meetings right from their BlackBerry 10 smartphone,” said Raj Gossain, Vice President of Product Management, Cloud Collaboration Applications Technology Group at Cisco. “Our customers access Cisco collaboration capabilities, such as instant messaging, IP voice calling and conferencing on BlackBerry devices to stay connected anywhere, anytime, and with anyone. BlackBerry and Cisco have worked together to develop an application that is user friendly and meets the needs of our global customers.”

“SAP is committed to building beautiful, easy-to-use mobile apps to help our customers run their business better,” said Pete Graham, Director of Finance Solutions & Mobility, SAP. “We are having a very good experience developing enterprise-grade finance apps on the BlackBerry 10 platform using the SAP Mobile Platform. With the SAP Mobile Platform the mobile app development community can build apps that can run on both the new BlackBerry 10 and the existing BlackBerry platforms and devices.”

“As a leader in enterprise mobility, Citrix provides secure apps and data for any device on any platform. With the BlackBerry 10 platform coming to the market, we are working with the BlackBerry development teams to support BlackBerry 10 enterprise users with access to Citrix applications,” noted Chris Fleck, Citrix VP Mobile Solutions and Alliances.

“Mobility has completely transformed the enterprise, powering new levels of productivity for businesses and individuals around the world,” said Karen Appleton, VP of Business Development at Box. “Our deep integration with BlackBerry 10 connects users directly with all of their business content on Box, delivering a secure collaboration experience with intuitive features for fast and fluid file sharing. Box has built native apps for every leading mobile platform and we’re excited to continue our great relationship of innovation with the RIM team.”

“BlackBerry users have had access to critical news and market information via the Bloomberg Professional service for over 10 years, enabling business and financial professionals to make real-time, informed decisions about the markets,” said John Waanders, Head of Bloomberg Anywhere Mobile. “We are pleased to deliver a high-quality, secure experience to our subscribers with our Bloomberg Anywhere app on the new BlackBerry 10, and look forward to working with RIM as the platform evolves.”

“The debut of The Wall Street Journal’s app for BlackBerry 10 is the latest evolution in our ‘WSJ Everywhere’ digital strategy to meet new audiences through new digital platforms,” said Alisa Bowen, Head of Product for Dow Jones & Company. “The global reach of the BlackBerry platform allows us to continue expanding upon our own international growth, particularly in Asia, Europe and South America.”

“BlackBerry 10 changes the game – while the platform conforms to modern standards and is easy to adopt, the applications can integrate with the mobile operating system and with other applications in entirely new ways,” said Adam Linford, Head of Truphone Labs. “This has provided Truphone with the opportunity to rethink how we approach mobile VoIP applications, and open up new avenues for development in the future.”

“With over 165,000 professionals using our voice productivity technology worldwide, BigHand is focused on providing applications that can help busy professionals get more done from anywhere in the world on their smartphone,” Jon Ardron, CEO of BigHand. “Our longtime relationship with RIM has helped BigHand bring some of the first enterprise mobile dictation apps to the marketplace years ago. The new BlackBerry 10 is a continuation of that relationship and reinforces BigHand’s commitment to providing first-to-market productivity apps for professionals, as well as, continuing to support our large mobile application user base that utilizes BlackBerry smartphones. As our clients and other organizations move to the BlackBerry 10 platform, BigHand will immediately be able to offer them support this newest and highly anticipated mobile platform.”

Have you downloaded any enterprise apps that you’re particularly fond of? Have an interesting enterprise developer you want us to interview? Let us know by commenting below!