Today, physician practices, hospitals, and other medical institutions utilize medical transcription services of all kinds, every day, using a wide variety of technologies. The history of transcription and Transcription Service sheds some light on how we got here.

Transcription is preceded, in both the business and medical worlds, by stenography. When there was no ability to record the voice for transcribing, there was no transcription! The stenographer was the first person to take a voice and turn it into a document.

Stenography, also known as shorthand or brachygraphy, goes all the way back to Ancient Greece, 300 years before Christ. Zooming forward, we find the modern secretary, who first appeared in offices in the middle of the 19^th century, using one of two popular shorthand methods introduced at that time: Pittman and Gregg. Stenographers quickly wrote down the spoken word in a systematized code they could later transcribe, but it wasn’t cost effective to have two people simultaneously working on a document.

Dictation machines (Dicataphones) began being used in an office environment as early as the 1880s, however, it was only with the introduction of tape cassettes in the 1970s that recording and then transcribing dictation became practical in a widespread way.  Because dictation cassettes (unlike the earlier wax cylinders or reel-to-reel devices) can be small and easily moved about, it was practical to use machines for short documents such as correspondence or physician notes.

In the 1990s, digital recording was introduced. Convenience and portability increased, and the stenographer effectively disappeared from public life except for specialized areas such as court stenography.

Once email became commonplace, these digital recordings could be transferred back and forth over distances, allowing transcription to be done from home. Transcription service providers could be located anywhere in the world.

Perhaps the final barrier was file size. Digital voice recordings are large files that could be cumbersome to transfer. However, in the twenty-first century, cloud storage allows these large voice files to be transmitted without hogging the bandwidth of a mail client. For specialists such as medical transcriptionists, this provides a great deal of freedom, and now medical institutions can hire the best transcriptionists at the best rates.