Before Siri spoke up as the iPhone's digital assistant or the Amazon Echo was taking requests in people's homes, there was the granddaddy of all talking devices. (Laughter) Everybody that robotic ...

This is the under-the-hood view of the keyboard for the Voder (Voice Operating Demonstrator), the first electronic device capable of generating continuous human speech. It accomplishes this feat ...

Long before Siri, there was Pedro the Voice Operation Demonstrator– "Voder" for short. This first machine to talk electronically was the brainchild of an engineer named Homer Dudley who worked at Bell ...

The Voder (Voice Operating Demonstrator) was made by Homer Dudley at Bell Telephone Laboratory in 1937-1938. The Voder was a system capable of creating recognizable speech without human vocal cords ...

This curious colloquy took place last week in Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, where engineers of Bell Telephone Laboratories and a trained operator demonstrated a complicated electronic device ...

We are far too used to machine-made voices speaking to us in today's world. Be it the automated responses that are provided to us when we call for customer support, personal assistants in our ...

Abstract: This article explores the labor demands of the Voder, the electrical speech synthesis machine developed by Bell Labs for AT&T’s 1939 New York World’s Fair exhibit. The article situates the ...

Electronic voices may be commonplace now, but the road to speech synthesis is littered with the remains of devices that promised to bring us the voice of the future — but didn’t last beyond their ...