Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 8.
The Voder being demonstrated at the Franklin Institute in 1939 (Courtesy of
the
Journal of the Franklin Institute
, Philadelphia, PA)
audience were asked to suggest phrases for it to speak. Even such difficult
foreign words and phrases as “hasenpfeffer” and “Comment allez-vous?”
were convincingly spoken by the machine.
The Voder functioned by imitating the two fundamental types of
human speech sounds: the relatively musical note of the vocal cords,
which in the Voder came from a vacuum tube, and a sibilant hiss which
can be recognised most easily in a whisper, and which, in the Voder, was
produced in a gas-filled tube. The tubes each produced an electric wave
whose pattern corresponded to the sounds in question, the wave being
converted into sound in an amplifier.
