What major technological migration served as the real catalyst for shifting transcription from recorded dictation to live or recorded call transcription?

Answer

The massive technological migration from analog to digital signals.

The pivotal moment that allowed transcription to evolve past the labor-intensive, slow process tied to physical media like magnetic tape was the broad technological shift from analog audio storage to digital signal representation. Analog audio degraded over time and was inherently difficult for computers to manipulate programmatically. When voice communications became digitized, sound was transformed into structured data. This transformation meant that specialized algorithms could perform complex mathematical operations on the audio features far more rapidly than any human could manually process them, thereby enabling software—the precursor to modern ASR engines—to begin processing the audio immediately upon capture, which fundamentally separates modern call transcription from historical dictation transcription.

What major technological migration served as the real catalyst for shifting transcription from recorded dictation to live or recorded call transcription?
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