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 accomplishments are not above suspicion. Nine years earlier, he had built a chess-playing machine, which defeated many players, including Napoleon (who, incidentally, made several unsuccessful attempts to cheat). Eventually, it was discovered that the machine was a fraud--its cabinet concealed a hidden, human chess player, who controlled the game. In 1830, Professor Joseph Faber, of Vienna, Austria, produced his own speaking automaton. Faber's machine, dubbed Euphonia, had taken twenty-five years to construct. Designed to look like a bearded Turk, the creation could recite the alphabet, whisper, laugh, and ask "How do you do?" Speech was produced by its inner workings--double bellows, levers, gears, and keys located inside the mannequin. Strangely enough, Euphonia spoke English with a German accent.
The first talking machines employing electronic technology were developed in the 1930s. The Voice Operation Demonstrator, or Voder, invented by Dudley in 1933, could imitate human speech using electrical analogues of a human vocal tract via electric circuits. It could utter complete sentences as its operator pressed keys on a board. Speech-synthesis technology evolved further with the rapid development of computer technology in the 1950s. During the late 1960s, the MITalk System was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Although originally designed as a reading machine for the blind, once completed, the system could convert virtually any type of text into speech-synthesized output. Raymond Kurzweil also developed speech-synthesis technology to aid the blind. In 1976, he produced the Kurzweil reading machine which could read everything from a phone bill to a full-length novel and provided unlimited-vocabulary synthesized output. Sometimes called a set of eyes for the blind, the reading machine has proved very popular. Another use of a voice synthesizer for the visually impaired was a navigational system developed by a student in Ottawa, Canada, in 1986. Charles LaPierre used global positional systems satellites and a self-created database in a portable computer to determine his position when walking around a city. The voice synthesizer relays location, including street signs, so someone could navigate around the city. In 1986, another voice synthesizer was developed by Bloomfield R & D, for use in toys and for patients recovering from surgery. Called P.O Vox--for the post-operative synthesized voice--the battery-operated device featured a tube that could be placed in the patientÕs mouth. When the patient touched the case, he or she could speak, no matter how softly, through the tube and be heard via a synthesized voice. This allows the patient to communicated clearly with doctors after surgery or when too weak to speak clearly.
Today, speech synthesis is a useful way to convey information in public places. Cars, appliances, and even games are being equipped with voice-synthesizer chips. In the early 1990s, "talking chessboard" was introduced that played an amateurish game of chess and announced each move it makes. Macintosh computers came with a Speech Manager, which was a text-to-speech system extension, throughout the 1990s.
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