ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a basic grounding in the mechanics of speech production, and then describes four important historical synthetic speech devices. It is devoted to the mechanical speech synthesizer that he himself created, called The Talking Machine. The chapter gives some brief workman-like notes on acoustic theory and on the human production of English speech sounds. Everyone speaks differently. There is such a wide variety of speech, we are highly skilled at recognizing the underlying patterns – but we also rely very heavily on context. Provided that the listener has some idea of what to expect, it is possible that even a comparatively simple device which can reproduce human speech sounds at the correct tempo, will be understood. The Talking Machine is sometimes exhibited in interactive mode. The public can use the keyboard to make it count and recite the alphabet and various poems and can also input sentences for it speak.
