Dictaphone was an American company founded by Alexander Graham Bell that produced dictation machines. It is now a division of Nuance Communications, based in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Although the name "Dictaphone" is a trademark, it has become genericized as a means to refer to any dictation machine.

The Volta Laboratory was established by Alexander Graham Bell in Washington, D.C. in 1881. When the Laboratory's sound-recording inventions were sufficiently developed with the assistance of Charles Sumner Tainter and others, Bell and his associates set up the Volta Graphophone Company, which later merged with the American Graphophone Company (founded in 1887) which itself later evolved into Columbia Records (founded as the Columbia Phonograph Company in 1889).

The name "Dictaphone" was trademarked in 1907 by the Columbia Graphophone Company, which soon became the leading manufacturer of such devices. This perpetuated the use for voice recording of wax cylinders, which had otherwise been eclipsed by disc-based technology. Dictaphone was spun off into a separate company in 1923 under the leadership of C. King Woodbridge.

In 1947, having relied on wax-cylinder recording to the end of World War II, Dictaphone introduced its Dictabelt technology. This cut a mechanical groove into a Lexan plastic belt instead of into a wax cylinder. The advantage of the Lexan belt was that recordings were permanent and admissible in court. Eventually IBM introduced a dictating machine using an erasable belt made of magnetic tape which enabled the user to correct dictation errors rather than marking errors on a paper tab. Dictaphone in turn added magnetic recording models while still selling the models recording on the Lexan belts. Machines based on magnetic tape recording were introduced in the late seventies, initially using the standard compact (or "C") cassette, but soon, in dictation machines, using mini-cassettes or microcassettes instead. Using smaller cassette sizes was important to the manufacturer for reducing the size of portable recorders.

Walter D. Fuller became the director of the company in 1952. In 1969 he was appointed as chairman.

In Japan, JVC was licensed to produce machines designed and developed by Dictaphone. Dictaphone and JVC later developed the picocassette, released in 1985, which was even smaller than a microcassette but retained a good recording quality and duration.

Dictaphone also developed "endless loop" recording^{[citation needed]} using magnetic tape, introduced in the mid-seventies as the "Thought Tank". The recording medium did not need to be moved from where the dictation took place to the location such as a typing pool where the typists were located. This was normally operated via a dedicated in-house telephone system, enabling dictation to be made from a variety of locations within the hospital or other organizations with typing pools. One version calculated each typist's turnaround time and allocated the next piece of dictation accordingly.