Even Apple’s Siri, arguably the cutting-edge of synthesized computer voices, sounds incredibly fake. To the point where you’d think that field of research has only been around for about 10 years. But shockingly it dates back to the 1930s—80+ years ago!
But we’ve still come an incredibly long way in recreating human voice and speech, as this Bell Labs video from 1967 reaffirms. The animation was created to demonstrate what would have been cutting edge text-to-speech conversion software at the time, but instead of leaving you impressed it’s probably going to leave you unsettled and wishing you’d never hit play. Christopher Nolan’s creepy interpretation of Bane’s voice has nothing on what Bell Labs inadvertently created 45 years ago. [YouTube]
