A trademark for a small hand-held tape recorder used to register spoken words which were to be written down exactly as they had been recorded: In the past when dictaphones were being used, Mary's grandfather needed to have a device to record the notes he was saying out loud and he used a dictaphone for this purpose.

Back in the early 20th century, the dictaphone was a small cassette recorder that was used to record speeches for transcription at another time.