Dictaphone was an American company founded by Alexander Graham Bell that produced dictation machines. It is now a division of Nuance Communications, based in Burlington, Massachusetts.
Although the name "Dictaphone" is a trademark, it has become genericized as a means to refer to any dictation machine.
The Volta Laboratory was established by Alexander Graham Bell in Washington, D.C. in 1881. When the Laboratory's sound-recording inventions were sufficiently developed with the assistance of Charles Sumner Tainter and others, Bell and his associates set up the Volta Graphophone Company, which later merged with the American Graphophone Company (founded in 1887) which itself later evolved into Columbia Records [1] (founded as the Columbia Phonograph Company in 1889).
The name "Dictaphone" was trademarked in 1907 by the Columbia Graphophone Company, which soon became the leading manufacturer of such devices. This perpetuated the use for voice recording of wax cylinders, which had otherwise been eclipsed by disc-based technology. Dictaphone was spun off into a separate company in 1923 under the leadership of C. King Woodbridge. [2]
In 1947, having relied on wax-cylinder recording to the end of World War II, Dictaphone introduced its Dictabelt technology. This cut a mechanical groove into a Lexan plastic belt instead of into a wax cylinder. The advantage of the Lexan belt was that recordings were permanent and admissible in court. Eventually IBM introduced a dictating machine using an erasable belt made of magnetic tape which enabled the user to correct dictation errors rather than marking errors on a paper tab. Dictaphone in turn added magnetic recording models while still selling the models recording on the Lexan belts. Machines based on magnetic tape recording were introduced in the late seventies, initially using the standard compact (or "C") cassette, but soon, in dictation machines, using mini-cassettes or microcassettes instead. Using smaller cassette sizes was important to the manufacturer for reducing the size of portable recorders.
Walter D. Fuller became the director of the company in 1952. [3] In 1969 he was appointed as chairman. [4]
In Japan, JVC was licensed to produce machines designed and developed by Dictaphone. Dictaphone and JVC later developed the picocassette, released in 1985, which was even smaller than a microcassette but retained a good recording quality and duration.
Dictaphone also developed "endless loop" recording[ citation needed ] using magnetic tape, introduced in the mid-seventies as the "Thought Tank". The recording medium did not need to be moved from where the dictation took place to the location such as a typing pool where the typists were located. This was normally operated via a dedicated in-house telephone system, enabling dictation to be made from a variety of locations within the hospital or other organizations with typing pools. One version calculated each typist's turnaround time and allocated the next piece of dictation accordingly.
Dictaphone was prominent in the provision of multi-channel recorders, used extensively in the emergency services to record emergency telephone calls (to numbers such as 911, 999, 112) and subsequent conversations.
Additionally, Dictaphone at one point expanded its product line to market a line of electronic (desktop and portable) calculators.
In 1979, Dictaphone was purchased by Pitney Bowes and kept as a wholly owned but independent subsidiary.
Dictaphone bought Dual Display Word Processor, a stiff competitor to Wang Laboratories, the industry leader.[ citation needed ]
In 1982 it marketed a word processor from Symantec. The hardware sold for $5,950 in 1982. The software was an additional $600. [5] The advent of the personal computer, MS-DOS, and general-purpose word-processing software saw the demise of the dedicated word-processor, and the division was closed.
In 1995, Pitney Bowes sold Dictaphone to the investment group Stonington Partners of Connecticut for a reported $462 million. [6] Dictaphone thereafter sold a range of products that included speech-recognition and voicemail software with limited success as the market only existed among some early adopters despite its vertical markets' enhancements.
In 2000, Dictaphone was acquired by the then-leading Belgian voice-recognition and translation company Lernout & Hauspie for nearly $1 billion. Lernout & Hauspie provided the voice-recognition technology for Dictaphone's enhanced voice-recognition-based transcription system. [7] Soon after the purchase, however, the SEC raised questions about Lernout & Hauspie's finances, focusing on the supposedly skyrocketing income reported from its East Asian endeavors. Subsequently, the company and all its subsidiaries, including Dictaphone, were forced into bankruptcy protection. [8]
In early 2002, Dictaphone emerged from bankruptcy as a privately held organization, with Rob Schwager as its chairman and CEO. [9] [10] In 2004, it was split into three divisions:
In June 2005, Dictaphone Corporation announced the sale of its Communications Recording Systems to NICE Systems for $38.5 million. [11] This was considered a great bargain in the industry [12] [ failed verification ] and came after NICE was ordered to pay Dictaphone $10 million in settlements related to a patent-infringement suit in late 2003. [13] [14]
In September 2005, Dictaphone sold its IVS business outside the United States to a private Swiss group around its former VP Martin Niederberger, who formed Dictaphone IVS AG (later Calison AG) in Urdorf, Switzerland and developed "FRISBEE", the first hardware-independent dictation-management software system with integrated speech-recognition and workflow management. In 2008, iSpeech AG took over the activities and products of the former Calison AG.
In February and March 2006, the remainder of Dictaphone was sold for $357 million to Nuance Communications (formerly ScanSoft), ending its short tenure as an independent company that had begun in 2002. This, in effect, closed a circle of events, as Dictaphone had been sold to Lernout & Hauspie prior to L&H's bankruptcy which resulted in Dictaphone becoming an independent company. [15]
In March 2007, Nuance acquired Focus Informatics and, with the intention of further expansion in its healthcare-transcription business, linked it with its Dictaphone division. [16]
Phonograph cylinders are the earliest commercial medium for recording and reproducing sound. Commonly known simply as "records" in their heyday, a name which has been passed on to their disc-shaped successor, these hollow cylindrical objects have an audio recording engraved on the outside surface which can be reproduced when they are played on a mechanical cylinder phonograph. The first cylinders were wrapped with tin foil but the improved version made of wax was created a decade later, after which they were commercialized. In the 1910s, the competing disc record system triumphed in the marketplace to become the dominant commercial audio medium.
Columbia Graphophone Co. Ltd. was one of the earliest gramophone companies in the United Kingdom.
Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products (L&H) was a Belgium-based speech recognition technology company, founded by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, that went bankrupt in 2001 because of a fraud engineered by the management. The company was based in Ypres, Flanders, in what was later called Flanders Language Valley.
The Microcassette is an audio storage medium, introduced by Olympus in 1969.
Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software.
Charles Sumner Tainter was an American scientific instrument maker, engineer and inventor, best known for his collaborations with Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell, Alexander's father-in-law Gardiner Hubbard, and for his significant improvements to Thomas Edison's phonograph, resulting in the Graphophone, one version of which was the first Dictaphone.
Bell and Howell is a United States brand of cameras, lenses, and motion picture machinery. It was originally founded as a company in 1907, and headquartered in Wheeling, Illinois. The company was acquired by Böwe Systec in 2003. Since 2010, the brand name has been licensed for a variety consumer electronics products.
MacSpeech, Inc. was a New Hampshire-based technology company that produced software-based speech recognition and voice dictation solutions for the Apple ecosystem. The company's products included iListen, MacSpeech Dictate, MacSpeech Dictate Medical, MacSpeech Dictate Legal, MacSpeech Dictate International, and MacSpeech Scribe. On February 12, 2010, Nuance Communications, Inc. acquired MacSpeech.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a speech recognition software package developed by Dragon Systems of Newton, Massachusetts, which was acquired in turn by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, Nuance Communications, and Microsoft. It runs on Windows personal computers. Version 15, which supports 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 7, 8 and 10, was released in August 2016.
The Graphophone was the name and trademark of an improved version of the phonograph. It was invented at the Volta Laboratory established by Alexander Graham Bell in Washington, D.C., United States.
Pitney Bowes Inc. is an American technology company most known for its postage meters and other mailing equipment and services, and with expansions into e-commerce, software, and other technologies. The company was founded by Arthur Pitney, who invented the first commercially available postage meter, and Walter Bowes as the Pitney Bowes Postage Meter Company on April 23, 1920.
A dictation machine is a sound recording device most commonly used to record speech for playback or to be typed into print. It includes digital voice recorders and tape recorder.
Weidner Communications Inc. was founded by Stephen Weidner in 1977 and marketed the Weidner Multi-Lingual Word Processing System.
Michael J. Critelli is the CEO and an investor in The MakeUsWell network of the MoveFlux Corporation. He is the former chairman and CEO (1996-2007) of Pitney Bowes.
The Volta Laboratory and the Volta Bureau were created in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., by Alexander Graham Bell.
Murray D. Martin is the former Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of the U.S.-based Pitney Bowes. In 2007, he was appointed CEO to succeed Michael J. Critelli. Martin joined Pitney Bowes in 1987 and is best known for Pitney Bowes’ transformation from an American company selling goods and services into a global company.
Speech Processing Solutions is an international electronics company headquartered in Vienna, Austria. The company designs, develops, manufactures and markets speech processing devices, such as those used in digital dictation and speech recognition. Speech Processing Solutions was formed on 1 July 2012. Philips Speech Processing was part of the Philips Consumer Lifestyle sector. Speech Processing Solutions is now an official licensee of the Philips brand. The company has subsidiaries in the US, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France and Germany, and employs around 170 people worldwide.
The North American Phonograph Company was an early attempt to commercialize the maturing technologies of sound recording in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Though the company was largely unsuccessful in its goals due to legal, technical and financial problems, it set the stage for the modern recording industry in the mid 1890s.
IBM Electric Typewriter Division manufactured and sold dictation equipment from 1960 until 1982. This was a totally new product area for IBM who had no previous experience in this field. The Typewriter Division entered the market to meet Thomas J. Watson Jr.'s goal to double their business size every five years, which given their dominance in the electric typewriter market, meant they needed to offer a wider variety of product types. IBMs goal with dictation machines was to provide efficient, easy to use products that offered high audio fidelity. However while dictation machines were complementary with IBMs typewriter product range, it did require IBMs Sales reps to learn how to sell a totally different product. This was because many executives were reluctant to use dictation machines. IBM was the market leader by 1965, outselling their biggest competitor Dictaphone and driving Ediphone out of the market. Unit sales peaked in 1969 at 98,000 units, which was roughly a 33% market share.
The election of Walter D. Fuller as a director of the Dictaphone Corporation ...
The election of Donald D. Marsden to the newly-created post of vice president for finance and administration in the Dictaphone Corporation was announced yesterday by Walter W. Finke, president. Mr. Marsden also was made a board
The Dictaphone Corporation, a unit of Pitney Bowes, has introduced a word processor that would give users the ability to retrieve electronically stored information by typing questions in English
Dictaphone Corporation announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement with NICE Systems (NASDAQ: NICE) under which NICE will acquire the assets of Dictaphone's Communication Recording Systems (CRS) business for $38.5 million.
