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Digital dictation is a method of recording and editing the spoken word in real-time. The recording is done by the use of a digital recorder. Digital recorders are lighter, have a longer battery life and are able to record for a lot longer utilizing the same media, as compared to analog tape based dictation machines. The files generated with digital recorders vary in size, depending on the manufacturer and the format the user chooses. The most common file formats that digital recorders generate have one of the extensions WAV, WMA or MP3. True dictation machines record in the DSS and DS2 format.
Digital Speech Standard (DSS) is a proprietary compressed digital audio file format defined by the International Voice Association, a co-operative venture by Olympus, Philips and Grundig Business Systems.
The DSS and DS2 file formats compress audio allowing for greater portability. In some cases, speech is recorded where sound quality is paramount and transcription unnecessary, e.g. for broadcasting a theatre play; such recording uses techniques closer to high-fidelity music recording, rather than those discussed here.
Broadcasting is the distribution of audio or video content to a dispersed audience via any electronic mass communications medium, but typically one using the electromagnetic spectrum, in a one-to-many model. Broadcasting began with AM radio, which came into popular use around 1920 with the spread of vacuum tube radio transmitters and receivers. Before this, all forms of electronic communication were one-to-one, with the message intended for a single recipient. The term broadcasting evolved from its use as the agricultural method of sowing seeds in a field by casting them broadly about. It was later adopted for describing the widespread distribution of information by printed materials or by telegraph. Examples applying it to "one-to-many" radio transmissions of an individual station to multiple listeners appeared as early as 1898.
Digital dictation offers several advantages over traditional cassette tape based dictation:
- The user can instantly rewind or fast forward to any point within the dictation file to review or edit.
- The random access ability of digital audio allows inserting audio at any point without overwriting the following text.
- Dictation produces a file which can be transferred electronically, e.g. via WAN, LAN, USB, e-mail, telephony, BlackBerry, FTP, etc.
- Large dictation files can be shared with multiple typists.
- Sound may be CD quality and can improve transcription accuracy and speed[ citation needed ].
- Digital dictation provides the ability to report on the volume or type of dictation and transcription outstanding or completed within an organization.
In computer science, random access is the ability to access an arbitrary element of a sequence in equal time or any item of data from a population of addressable elements roughly as easily and efficiently as any other, no matter how many elements may be in the set. It is typically contrasted to sequential access.
Digital audio is sound that has been recorded in, or converted into, digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is encoded as numerical samples in continuous sequence. For example, in CD audio, samples are taken 44100 times per second each with 16 bit sample depth. Digital audio is also the name for the entire technology of sound recording and reproduction using audio signals that have been encoded in digital form. Following significant advances in digital audio technology during the 1970s, it gradually replaced analog audio technology in many areas of audio engineering and telecommunications in the 1990s and 2000s.
File transfer is the transmission of a computer file through a communication channel from one computer system to another. Typically, file transfer is mediated by a communications protocol. In the history of computing, a large number of file transfer protocols have been designed for different contexts.
Dictation audio can be recorded in various audio file formats. 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. (Note that WAV is not an audio encoding format, but a file format and has little or no bearing on the encoding rate (kbit/s), size or audio quality of the resulting file.)
An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, often using lossy compression. The data can be a raw bitstream in an audio coding format, but it is usually embedded in a container format or an audio data format with defined storage layer.
Waveform Audio File Format is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is an application of the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) bitstream format method for storing data in "chunks", and thus is also close to the 8SVX and the AIFF format used on Amiga and Macintosh computers, respectively. It is the main format used on Microsoft Windows systems for raw and typically uncompressed audio. The usual bitstream encoding is the linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) format.
Digital dictation is different from speech recognition where audio is analyzed by a computer using speech algorithms in an attempt to transcribe the document. With digital dictation the process of converting digital audio to text may be done using digital transcription software, typically controlled by a foot switch which allows the transcriber to PLAY, STOP, REWIND, and BACKSPACE.
These days there are Digital Transcription Kits that allow integration with Speech Recognition Software. This gives the typist the option to either type a document manually, or send a document to be converted to text by Software such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
