A dictation machine is a sound recording device most commonly used to record speech for later playback or to be typed into print.
The name "Dictaphone" is a trademark of the company of the same name, but has also become a common term for all dictation machines, as a genericized trademark. Sometimes when the general term rather than the specific company is referred to, the variation "dictophone" is used.
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History
Shortly after Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, the first device for recording sound, in 1877, he thought that the main use for the new device would be for recording speech in business settings. (Given the low audio fidelity of earliest versions of the phonograph, recording music may not have seemed to be a major application.) Some early phonographs were indeed used this way, but this did not become common until the mass production of reusable wax cylinders in the late 1880s. The differentiation of office dictation devices from other early phonographs (which commonly had attachments for making one's own recordings) was gradual. The machine marketed by the Edison Records company was trademarked as the "Ediphone".
Electric microphones generally replaced the strictly acoustical recording methods of earlier dictaphones by the late 1930s. In 1945, the SoundScriber and Gray Audograph, which cut grooves into a plastic disc, was introduced, and two years later Dictaphone replaced wax cylinders with their DictaBelt technology, which cut a mechanical groove into a plastic belt instead of into a wax cylinder. This was later replaced by magnetic tape recording. While reel-to-reel tape was used for dictation, the inconvenience of threading tape spools led to development of more convenient formats, notably the Compact Cassette, Mini Cassette, and Microcassette.
Digital dictation became possible in the 1990s as falling computer memory prices made possible pocket-sized digital voice recorders that stored sound on computer memory chips, without moving parts. In the 1990s, improvements in voice recognition technology began to allow computers to transcribe recorded audio dictation into text form, a task that previously required human secretaries or transcribers. As of 2009[update] the technology is not robust enough to replace human transcription in most cases.
Despite the advances in technology, analog media are still widely used in dictation recording for their flexibility, permanence, and robustness.
Common dictation formats
- Wax cylinder (1890s)
- Gray Audograph (1945)
- SoundScriber (1945)
- DictaBelt (1947)
- Compact Cassette (1963)
- Mini Cassette (1967)
- Microcassette (1969)
- Digital dictation (1990s)
See also
External links
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