Best Practices for Alternate Spoken Names

The Administration Console provides Alternate Spoken Name fields where you can enter data that can help you prevent speech recognition problems by following these best practices.

When a user asks the Vocera Genie to contact a person or place in the address book, the speech recognition software tries to match the spoken name to a name in a user profile, a group, or an address book entry.

People may not always use the name that is entered in the system, however, or they may pronounce it in a way that the Vocera system does not recognize.

The following table lists important rules to follow when entering information in the “Alternate Spoken Name” fields.
DO's DON'Ts
DO use Alternate Spoken Names for users that make sense and do so judiciously.
  • Create another form of the name only when the alternate name for a group or a user is used frequently by others.

    For instance, the department group name may be entered as Emergency Department however many people call this department by saying, “Call E D” or your co-worker Charles Baker is well known by the team as "Chuck Baker".

  • Enter an Alternate Spoken Name for someone who has recently had a name change.

    For example, after Rebecca Berry married she changed her name to Rebecca Nunn.

DON'T enter an alternate name unless it is really needed.

Remember, the more alternate names that are entered, the more entries the system has to search through to determine a match for what a user requested in a command to the Genie.

DO use real words.

For example Lee Nguyen could have a phonetic Alternate Spoken Name of "Lee When".

DON'T enter phonetic spellings if the words are nonsense.

For instance do not enter "Lee neh wha enh" as a phonetic Alternate Spoken Name for Lee Nguyen. Since "Neh", "wha", and "enh" are not real words and are just as bad for speech recognition as not having the phonetic entry at all.

DO:
  • Use the Alternate Spoken Name field, if an individual uses a given name as well as a nickname. For example, Lauren Galaty also answers to Laurie Galaty.
  • Add an Alternate Spoken Name of “Doctor <last name>”, where <last name> is the surname of the physician. Generally speaking people refer to physicians using the format of title and last name, or in some cases title and first name. However, organizations should consider adding Alternate Spoken Names of “Doctor <first and last name>” to avoid duplication.
  • Enter a phonetic spelling for a name if many users can not pronounce the name.
DON'T:
  • Use Alternate Spoken Names to spell out different ways of saying a numbered group name.

    For instance, Room 299 does not need the Alternate Spoken Name of “Room Two Nine Nine”.

  • Create an alternate spoken name that contain numeric digits only. For example, a staff ID with numbers and no letters:
    567748

Refer to the section titled “Using Numeric Values in Names“ in the Vocera Administration Guide for more information.

DO completely spell out the full title or surname.

For example, "Professor", "Doctor", or "Mister".

DON'T use the abbreviated form of titles and surnames.

For example, do not enter "Prof.", "Dr." or "Mr.".

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