Wolfgang von Kempelen's speaking machine

Wolfgang von Kempelen's speaking machine is a manually operated speech synthesizer that began development in 1769, by Austro-Hungarian author and inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen. It was in this same year that he completed his far more famous contribution to history: The Turk, a chess-playing automaton, later revealed to be an elaborate hoax as it came to light that a person inside the automaton had secretly operated it. But while the Turk's construction was completed in six months, Kempelen's speaking machine occupied the next twenty years of his life. After two conceptual "dead ends" over the first five years of research, Kempelen's third direction ultimately led him to the design he felt comfortable deeming "final": a functional representational model of the human vocal tract.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.