The digital audio recorder is the latest in technology for office dictation, recording personal notes at meetings or conferences, and for less savory activities such as phone taps and other surveillance. Dictation via recording has almost completely replaced dictation to a live person who sat across the desk from the boss and wrote shorthand into a notebook. The difficulty with the person-to-person process included tying up two people for whatever time taken to dictate the letters or other documents needing to be produced. With the advent of the digital voice recorder, a secretary is freed to do other things while her boss did his dictation. Transcription time didn't change much, because she could read her own shorthand just about as quickly as she could listen to the spoken word.
The earliest recording dictation machines were cumbersome requiring space and standard audiotapes. The dictator wanted a recording for his secretary to transcribe used a microphone attached to the digital voice recorder. When the dictation was done, the tape was given to the secretary who had a transcriber about the same size as the recorder. The transcribing machine had a foot pedal attached for her to adjust the speed of the dictation to the speed of her typing. When she was through transcribing the letters or documents, she usually erased the tape and gave the information back to her boss. Before computers, she would give the boss her transcribed material as drafts for him to read over. He would make changes in the margins, and she retyped them for his signature.
Later came the much more compact and convenient hand-helds, with the micro cassette tapes--the precursors to digital audio recorders. Once computers became more popular the process was simplified greatly. Any changes could be made by going into the document that had been saved on a disk, and printing out the corrected letter without completely retyping it. The first recorder was not totally reliable, and was harder to operate than the current models. Backing up the recorded material to record over a mistake was hard to do, and sometimes impossible. A digital voice recorder is reliable, although more expensive than micro cassette recorders. Up to five microphones can be attached to some of them for recording everyone's remarks during a meeting. One model of a high-end option says there are 277 hours of recording available on it, and room for 266 pieces of music to listen to. On most models, an LCD screen lets a person view the files and pick one out to play back. It also has a docking station for hooking up to the PC to download or upload files, and has a file management system. It is important to know the history of such technologies in order to better things in the future.
Finally, computers could save the documents on their hard drives. Floppy disks might be used as a backup against a hard drive crash, but with the creation of the CD burner floppy disks are no longer necessary. A digital audio recorder is the next step in the process. There is almost no limit to the amount of material that can be recorded before downloading or transcribing. A plus is the absence of audiotapes, so one piece of equipment is all that is needed. Since they are operated with memory cards instead of mini tapes, recording can begin as soon as it's turned on and usually somewhere between 4 and 6 hours of recording can be done on one memory card. A digital audio recorder is also an entertainment item when recording music and playback. Headphones are available as attachments for listening pleasure, and the music can be transferred to the PC in seconds.
The value of current technology is clear to a busy business man who could use commuting time to dictate, or to a student who would rather begin his homework writing project by talking into a digital audio recorder. Anything that fits in the palm of the hand and can download onto a PC has to be a very handy tool indeed. The digital voice recorder is no doubt the wave of the future. It is said in 2 Corinthians 4:17 "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; God is with us in many ways, for some it is His will to give knowledge to help improve our way of life."
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