Synthetic speech dates to late-18th-century acoustic-mechanical machines

Evidence

Synthetic speech, in the sense of artificially created speech signals, has a relatively long history, including the acoustic–mechanical speech production by Kratzenstein and Von Kempelen (Schroeder, 1993) in the late 18th century, a mechanically controlled electronic synthesizer called the Voder by Dudley in 1939, and more advanced electronic synthesizers since the 1950s (Karjalainen and Laine, 1977; Karjalainen et al., 1980; Klatt, 1987; Schroeder, 1993). — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2226

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the historical-thread interest; synthetic voice machines as an early acoustic communication technology.