The earliest known "talking machine" was developed in 1778 by Wolfgang von Kempelen. Eyewitnesses reported that it could speak several words in a timid, childlike voice. While the talking machine's success appears genuine, Baron von Kempelen's...

The production of speech sounds by mechanical means, generally from text input. Speech synthesis is now a common technology, used in telephone information systems (in the United States) and in reading machines for the blind. Speech recognition reverses...

n. The process of producing, usually by electronic means, artificial speech which can be understood by humans. A device which does this is a speech synthesizer; the speech produced is synthetic speech. Speech synthesis by rule is a procedure for...

n. An instrument which allows a stretch of recorded speech to be played much more slowly than at normal speed but without distortion, useful for certain analytical...

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into...

Bluetooth headsets, the tiny earpieces that make people look like they're talking into thin air when they're on their cell phones, have been a success story despite often being maddeningly difficult to use.They have tiny, unlabeled buttons, and usually only communicate to the user with...