{"id":1493,"date":"2016-10-29T18:37:23","date_gmt":"2016-10-29T22:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/guentherlab\/?page_id=1493"},"modified":"2016-10-30T11:47:05","modified_gmt":"2016-10-30T15:47:05","slug":"history-of-speaking-machines","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/guentherlab\/miscellaneous-videos-and-oddities\/history-of-speaking-machines\/","title":{"rendered":"Von Kempelen’s Speaking Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first\u00a0attempt to create a machine that could generate human-like speech sounds is typically attributed to Wolfgang von Kempelen in the latter half of the 18th century (see Hartmut Traunmuller’s\u00a0excellent page<\/a> on the history of speaking machines for more information). Von Kempelen, who is more widely known\u00a0for his creation of the “The Turk”<\/a>, a fake chess-playing machine, is considered by some to be the first experimental phonetician. Von Kempelen\u00a0created a mechanical device consisting of a bellows that forced air through a reed into a chamber whose resonant properties could be manipulated with the hands to simulate a range of speech sounds. As seen in the video below, which demonstrates a modern replica of Von Kempelen’s machine created by Fabian Brackhane and colleagues, the “speech” produced by the machine is pretty rudimentary, but it started the ball rolling toward the impressive synthetic speech systems available today.<\/p>\n