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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

AT the World's Fairs in New York and San Francisco great interest was shown in the speech synthesizer shown in the Bell System exhibits. In the December number of the Bell Laboratories Record, H.