What inherently restricted the speed of early professional human transcription services based on dictation playback?

Answer

Speed was limited by the playback speed and the typist's words-per-minute rate.

Transcription during the era dominated by dictation relied entirely on human operators—stenographers or transcribers—who listened to audio playback from cylinders or tapes and manually typed the content. The efficiency of this process was severely bottlenecked by physical limitations. If a complex or poorly recorded section required replaying, pausing, or rewinding, the time taken increased substantially. For instance, transcribing a simple three-minute phone call often required an hour or more of dedicated labor time because the process could only move as fast as the human typist could type and as fast as the machine could physically rewind and replay the source material.

What inherently restricted the speed of early professional human transcription services based on dictation playback?

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