Dictation machine

They began their work at Bell's Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C.In 1879, and continued until they were granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax.

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.

[3] Additionally the Graphophones initially deployed foot treadles to rotate the recordings, then wind-up clockwork drive mechanisms, and finally migrated to electric motors, instead of the manual crank that was used on Edison's phonograph.

(Given the low audio frequency of earliest versions of the phonograph, recording music may not have seemed to be a major application.)

The differentiation of office dictation devices from other early phonographs, which commonly had attachments for making one's own recordings, was gradual.

Following the invention of the audion tube in 1906, electric microphones gradually replaced the purely acoustical recording methods of earlier dictaphones by the late 1930s.

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 files generated with digital recorders vary in size, depending on the manufacturer and the format the user chooses.

Most digital dictation systems use a lossy form of audio compression based on modelling of the vocal tract to minimize hard disk space and optimize network utilization as files are transferred between users.

Professional digital hand held recorders are available with slide switch, push button, fingerprint locking, and barcode scanning options.

Touch tone controls allow for start, pause, playback, and sending of dictation audio file.

The pod can then be plugged into a computer to store dictation audio recording in compatible transcription or management software.