About Strive for Education

Since opening in September 2020, Strive has created a great learning space with a growing community of 8 employees, ranging from support staff, pastoral staff, tutors and 26 students.

Based in Harrogate, North Yorkshire they specialise in working with students and young people who do not attend mainstream education on a full-time basis.

“Inordinate Amount” of Typing is The Final Straw for Strive

When speaking with Founder and education enthusiast Andy Brown, he highlighted the amount of time that his team were spending on typing up documentation to be the deciding factor in looking for a more efficient process.

Using Microsoft Word for most of their reporting, Andy explained that the team were spending a lot of time typing up their notes in order to create accurate and concise documentation:

Strive knew that there must be a quicker and more efficient way of carrying out these tasks, and that’s when they reached out to VoicePower Ltd.

From Inquiry to Implementation

As well as both Strive and VoicePower Ltd being a local business to Harrogate, Andy was recommended the speech recognition experts by a local educational establishment that use VoicePower as part of their support for some SEND (Special educational needs and disabilities) students.

After reaching out to the VoicePower team, Andy explained:

Taking Andy and his team through our Workflow Consultancy process, VoicePower were able to attain an understanding of the school’s requirements and understand what their new solution would be used for.

After the discovery meeting and exploring their options, VoicePower identified Dragon Professional Anywhere as the best option for Strive.

Dragon Professional Anywhere is one of Nuance’s cloud-based offerings making it extremely lightweight and easy to install as well as having an incredible speech recognition engine. Find out more about this version in this short video:

Benefits of Dragon Professional Anywhere

Set-Up, Support and Getting Started

Thanks to VoicePower’s support and training services, Strive was supported every step of the way, as Andy confirms:

Our extensive range of Dragon training courses is essential when aiming to achieve the best results possible with speech recognition. Carried out remotely and 1-2-1 with the users, the sessions are convenient and lead to an improved adoption rate.

Strive’s Verdict on The Dragon Education Tool

With the set-up and training complete, we can now get to the important bit: The results! All Strive staff members are now using the Dragon software, be that for emails and general letters, however, according to Andy “it is the people who write daily reports for students that report a huge saving in time.”

Most importantly, Andy explains how the team have found using speech recognition software, confirming that: “the feedback from staff has been positive and they are much happier spending more time supporting students and families and less time sat in front of a laptop.”

What’s more, Andy has been able to track their progress since using the software and identify a tangible saving:

This incredible time saving is down to Dragon’s ability to create words 3x faster than typing which also allows users to capture more detail in their case notes. Andy agrees, explaining: “Staff are now able to spend more time supporting students after school and complete other tasks with greater effectiveness.”

However, improved efficiency and time savings aren’t the only improvements that Dragon has generated, Andy also confirms:

Now that is what we call a success!

Dragon is “Great Value For Money!”

In short, Strive has seen incredible results with Dragon Professional Anywhere speech recognition, summarising their experience with VoicePower as “incredible throughout.”

Speaking on VoicePower’s Dragon technical support service, Andy explains:

Finally, when asked for any further comments on their journey from typing to Dragon education use, we asked Andy and the Strive team whether they had any further comments and well, the rest speaks for itself: