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While today text to speech technology gets so advanced that synthetic voices come quite close to human ones, during my childhood I got quite inspired by "robotic" mechanical voices in Hollywood sci fi movies of that time.

Now, my question is - was there an original TTS (text to speech) technology which gave input to those movies, or not?

J. Doe
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  • You might want to give us a hint as to what decade your childhood took place. For example, are you aware of the infamous "Chatty Cathy" doll? – Carl Witthoft Oct 15 '18 at 12:52

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The technology is that of the "Voder" and "Vocoder" exhibited at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. See the Wikipedia articles on the vocoder and the voder for some explanations and references to Sci Fi movies using it, and to this 1939 film clip. There is a recent pop technology history book How to Wreck a Nice Beach on the subject. The first non phone company and non military users of the technology seem to have been musicians. It lives on in all cell phones and VOIP phones nowadays.

kimchi lover
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There's a stop, or set of stops, on many cathedral organs called "vox humana." Granted these can only produce human-like vowel sounds, but that's the first "synth" I know of.

Now, prior to modern "text to speech" digital software, there was a period in the 1970s and early 80s when a limited, hardwired, voice synth was available. See for example "Firepower" pinball machine. THese chips, IIRC, stored a collection of waveforms (not digitized voice clips) and used some weak algos to try to "sound out" a limited number of character strings (words).

Carl Witthoft
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