The first speech synthesizer spoke in 1791
In 1791, Wolfgang von Kempelen's mechanical speech synthesizer amazed audiences, pioneering the technology that eventually led to today's voice assistants and artificial voices.
Long before Siri or Alexa, an Austrian inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen created the first mechanical speech synthesizer in 1791. This ingenious device mimicked the human vocal tract using bellows, reeds, and adjustable resonators to form sounds. It could utter short phrases like 'the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak' by manually operating levers.
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