Dictation audio can be recorded in various audio file formats. Many dictation machines record in the DSS and DS2 format. The most common file formats that digital recorders generate have one of the extensions WAV, WMA and MP3. The files generated with digital recorders vary in size, depending on the manufacturer and the format the user chooses. As of 2014 the technology is not robust enough to replace human transcription in most cases. 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. Many early 21st-century digital cameras and smartphones have this capability built in. 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.ĭigital 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. This was later replaced by magnetic tape recording.
In 1945, the SoundScriber, Gray Audograph and Edison Voicewriter, 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. The machine marketed by the Edison Records company was trademarked as the "Ediphone".įollowing the invention of the audion tube in 1906, electric microphones gradually replaced the purely acoustical recording methods of earlier dictaphones by the late 1930s. The differentiation of office dictation devices from other early phonographs, which commonly had attachments for making one's own recordings, was gradual. (Given the low audio frequency of earliest versions of the phonograph, recording music may not have seem to be a major application.) Some early phonograph were indeed used this way, but this did not become common until the production of reusable wax cylinders in the late 1880s.
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. Īmong the later improvements by the Volta Associates, the Graphophone used a cutting stylus to create lateral zig-zag grooves of uniform depth into the wax-coated cardboard cylinders, rather than the up-down vertically-cut grooves of Edison's contemporary phonograph machine designs. Edison's method was to indent the sound waves on a piece of tinfoil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or 'engraving', the sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus. The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent, and the Bell and Tainter patent of 1886 was the method of recording. Wax was put in the grooves of the heavy iron cylinder, and no tinfoil was used.
īy 1881 the Volta associates had success in improving an Edison tinfoil machine to some extent. Although Edison had hit upon the secret of sound recording, immediately after his discovery he did not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend the next five years developing the New York City electric light and power systems. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the stylus was properly adjusted. Edison had invented the phonograph in 1877, but the fame bestowed on him for this invention - sometimes called his most original - was not due to its efficiency.