The Demise of The Dictating Machine

The extremely large number of different recording media formats in the office dictation industry certainly did not help. However, over a very short time in the late 1960s, the format problem solved itself. In the early 1960s, Philips in Europe introduced the Compact Cassette--the term "cassette" came to be the generic term for this small tape cartridge. It was introduced as a general purpose recording medium, and the player/recorder that Philips manufactured was designed not to compete with the existing Philips dictation equipment. However, other manufacturers were encouraged to adopt the cassette. Led by Japanese firms, makers of dictation equipment quickly adopted the cassette , and by about 1970 the "format problem" had taken care of itself.

Despite all this innovation, office dictation was ultimately doomed. The personal computers introduced by Apple, IBM, and others in the late 1970s and 1980s led to a greater reliance on them for letter-writing. New dictation equipment users were not cultivated, and the market for dictation machines rapidly declined. IBM attempted to take dictation to a new level with its reseach program in voice recognition and automatic typing, but the main results were word processing systems -- voice recognition was still years away.

Meanwhile, Thomas A. Edison's Voicewriter division was sold to Lanier Business Systems, which adopted a cassette-based dictation machine. Dictaphone had already given up on the cylinder/belt, and at some point (apparently in the late 70s) quit making desktop dictation equipment entirely. Soundscriber, Gray, and other leaders were swallowed up and their products abandoned. Except for a few core users (particualrly law offices, doctors and hospitals) dictation equipment retreated to a tiny niche that it has occupied ever since.

Todays dictation machine is the computer. While you can still by a cassette-based dictation machine from Sanyo and others, most dictation is now done on digital recorders with a voice-recognition software. As this software improves, some form of dictation may come to challenge the keyboard as the preferred way that most writers compose their letters, but that day is still over the horizon.