Why can a modern digital radio system transmit voice and images, not just data?

In modern digital radio systems, all forms of media—whether voice, pictures, or video—start as continuous analog signals in the real world. By passing these signals through an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC), they are sampled and converted into discrete digital data streams consisting of ones and zeros. Once the analog information is fully converted into binary digits, the radio system treats it purely as data. The transmitter does not care whether the data originally represented a voice recording, an image file, or a text document; it simply transmits the binary stream. This is why digital protocols do not need to 'fall back to analog' to send voice. They just encode the analog audio into a digital format, transmit the data, and let the receiving radio decode it back into analog audio.