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"...science fiction is sort of like a sociological genome. It's a huge range of possible futures, most of them useless; some vital. You never really know in advance."
- Peter Watts

Electrosecretary  
  An automatic transcription device.  

There is no room on the moon for people who do jobs that can be handled by expert machinery.

When he had finished dictating, he paused to marshal his ideas, could think of nothing further...

He pressed the transcription key. Within twenty seconds all twelve pages of his report, impeccably typed and punctuated, had emerged from the office telefax. He scanned it rapidly, in case the electrosecretary had made mistakes. She did this occasionally (all electrosecs were "she"), especially during rush periods when she might be taking dictation from a dozen sources at once.

Technovelgy from A Fall of Moondust, by Arthur C. Clarke.
Published by Harcourt, Brace and World in 1961
Additional resources -

Clarke also correctly realizes the limits of even futuristic voice-recognition technology:

...no wholly sane machine could cope with all the eccentricities of a language like English, and every wise executive checked his final draft before he sent it out. Many were the hilarious disasters that had overtaken those who had left it all to electronics.

As far as I know, the first science fiction writer to suggest that a machine could transcribe the spoken word into words typed onto a page was David H. Keller; see the entry for vibrowriter from his poignant 1934 short story The Lost Language.

Compare also to the telescribe from A Question of Salvage (1939) by Malcom Jameson, the speakwrite from 1984 (1948) by George Orwell and the transcriber from Second Foundation (1953) by Isaac Asimov.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from A Fall of Moondust
  More Ideas and Technology by Arthur C. Clarke
  Tech news articles related to A Fall of Moondust
  Tech news articles related to works by Arthur C. Clarke

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