Dictaphone

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Thomas A. Edison dictating in 1907

A Dictaphone 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 a corporation which makes such devices, but has also become a common way to refer to all such devices, especially historic versions that used phonograph cylinders as the recording medium, as was common from the late 19th century until the early-mid 20th century, when vinyl records became the preferred medium. Sometimes when the general term rather than the specific company is referred to, the variation "dictophone" is used.

The name "Dictaphone" was trademarked by the Columbia Graphophone Company in 1907, which soon became the leading manufacturer of such devices. Dictaphone was spun off into a separate company in 1923 under the leadership of C. King Woodbridge, whose brother-in-law, George Albert Kimball successfully designed and built both the sewer system and then the subway system for the city of Boston.

The machine marketed by the Edison Records company was trademarked as the "Ediphone".

[edit] 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.

A Dictaphone advertisement from 1917

Electric microphones generally replaced the strictly acoustical recording methods of earlier dictaphones by the late 1930s. In 1947, 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.

In 1979 Dictaphone was purchased by Pitney Bowes but was kept as a wholly owned but autonomous subsidiary.

In 1995 Pitney Bowes sold Dictaphone to the investment group Stonington Partners of Connecticut for a reported $462 million.

SONY BM-610 dictaphone

During the following years, Dictaphone sold a range of products, including voice recognition software and interactive voice response systems (IVR, for voicemail loops.)

In March/April 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 needed to propel Dictaphone's voice recognition enhanced transcription system.

Soon after the purchase and triggered by an increased ownership of US companies (following the purchase of Dictaphone, within a month Lernout & Hauspie purchased its main voice-recognition competitor in the US, Dragon Systems, who has since been acquired by Nuance Communications, Inc.), the SEC raised questions about Lernout & Hauspie’s finances, focussing on reported income from its East Asian endeavours which seemed to sky-rocket during these times. Subsequently the company and all its subsidiaries were forced into bankruptcy protection (Chapter 11 for US assets such as Dictaphone).

In early 2002, Dictaphone emerged from Chapter 11 as a privately held organization with Rob Schwager as its Chairman and CEO, while the remaining assets were broken-up and sold individually with ScanSoft, now known as Nuance Communications, Inc., acquiring core businesses such as Dragon Systems and voice recognition research personnel in the US.

In 2004 Dictaphone was split into three divisions:

IHS - Healthcare Division focuses on Dictation for the medical industry
IVS - Dictation for Law Offices and Police Stations
CRS - Communications Recording Solutions. Focuses on recording Phones and Radios in Public Safety Organizations and Quality Monitoring solutions for Call Centers.

In June 2005 Dictaphone sold its Communications Recording Solutions to NICE Systems for $38.5 million, which was considered a great bargain in the industry. It has since focused its goals in speech recognition for the healthcare industry with only limited success, mainly building on its well established brand name.

In February/March 2006 the remainder of Dictaphone was sold for $357 million to Nuance Communications, formerly known as ScanSoft, ending its short tenure as an independent company it started in early 2002 and effectively closing a circle of events it started in early 2000 by being sold to Lernout & Hauspie (assets of which were sold to ScanSoft/Nuance in the events of early 2002).