InfraWare,  a medical transcription software company, will begin beta testing a new dictation recognition engine aimed at increasing the speed and reducing the cost per line of medical transcription through intelligent back-end automation.

The company will marry its existing InfraWare 360 transcription speech recognition platform and its new artificial intelligence engine to generate more accurate and less expensive first-draft text versions of physician audio dictations. Of the $1.2 million project budget, $871,000 was supplied by a grant from the state's 21st Century Research and Technology Fund.

The marriage of the company's two technologies accelerates the rate at which medical transcriptionists can process a physician's dictated reports and represents a significant increase in accuracy over previous attempts by the industry to incorporate speech recognition into transcription. The InfraWare technology incorporates a punctuation component that determines proper punctuation placement within the generated text.

InfraWare will begin releasing the software to test markets, and anticipates fully launching the product in 2009 to markets across the nation.