One of the early attempts to partially replicate human speech was the set of vowel horns made by Christian Kratzenstein in 1780. These mimicked the five basic vowel sounds without any attempt at replicating consonants.

About a decade after that, Wolfgang von Kempelen completed work on his speech engine. The final version consisted of a bellows, reed, a mock-up of the human oral and nasal cavities, a rubber mouth worked by hand, and a string-operated flap representing the tongue. This gave a fair approximation of several consonants.

Here is a video of a replica of Kempelen’s machine being operated

In 1938, Bell Labs developed a vocoder for compressing and simplifying recorded human speech. As a “proof of concept” project, they also developed a hand operated “Voder”, which could generate human speech. There were two sources of sound: a buzzing tube, for vowels, nasals and voiced consonants, and a hissing tube for voiceless consonants. These signals were passed through any of various bandpass filters.

Here is a video of the Voder in operation

Interesting, ta. Had to turn the Kempelen one right down to avoid scaring the neighbours. The Voder was impressive, seemingly better quality than Stephen Hawking’s voice.

Welcome to Big Mouth for the Commodore 64 was one I remember

https://youtu.be/TsdOej_nC1M
A longer Voder recording

dv said:

https://youtu.be/TsdOej_nC1M
A longer Voder recording

Well maybe not quite as good as Hawking’s voice.

And certainly much more difficult to operate by the sound of it.

Bubblecar said:

dv said:

https://youtu.be/TsdOej_nC1M
A longer Voder recording

Well maybe not quite as good as Hawking’s voice.

And certainly much more difficult to operate by the sound of it.

Mmm. In fairness to SJH, he can only make slight movements with one hand, whereas the Voder was a 10 key and foot-pedal job.

dv said:

Bubblecar said:

dv said:

https://youtu.be/TsdOej_nC1M
A longer Voder recording

Well maybe not quite as good as Hawking’s voice.

And certainly much more difficult to operate by the sound of it.

Mmm. In fairness to SJH, he can only make slight movements with one hand, whereas the Voder was a 10 key and foot-pedal job.

Even slight movements with one hand are a pretty remarkable achievement for someone in his current condition.

The Rev Dodgson said:

dv said:

Bubblecar said:

Well maybe not quite as good as Hawking’s voice.

And certainly much more difficult to operate by the sound of it.

Mmm. In fairness to SJH, he can only make slight movements with one hand, whereas the Voder was a 10 key and foot-pedal job.

Even slight movements with one hand are a pretty remarkable achievement for someone in his current condition.

Ha!

how slight, i don’t think ‘e’s reached thermodynamic zero yet

Bubblecar said:

Interesting, ta. Had to turn the Kempelen one right down to avoid scaring the neighbours. The Voder was impressive, seemingly better quality than Stephen Hawking’s voice.

There are plenty of digitally synthesised voices much better than Hawking’s these days, but Hawking himself refused all offers to upgrade as he was attached to his voice and didn’t want any other.

Bubblecar said:

Interesting, ta. Had to turn the Kempelen one right down to avoid scaring the neighbours. The Voder was impressive, seemingly better quality than Stephen Hawking’s voice.

There are plenty of digitally synthesised voices much better than Hawking’s these days, but Hawking himself refused all offers to upgrade as he was attached to his voice and didn’t want any other.