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Comment by scoot | Hacker News Reader

I was amazed to see speech synthesis (speak / vs) as a standard feature. A little googling lead me to this: "Donald Sherman orders a pizza using a talking computer, Dec 4, 1974"[1]

I seem to have a personal difficulty imagining the level of sophistication that existed prior my own awareness a particular technology; in the same way that it might sometimes appear that before color photography, the world was black-and-white.

I'm grateful to the technology archaeologist who set the record straight.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94d_h_t2QAA

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>personal difficulty imagining the level of sophistication that existed prior

I think this is something that happens in our industry specifically - every few years (to me it seems like every 4 years) - we go through these phases of amnesia. I honestly think it has to do with comp-sci grads launching themselves into the industry, and .. rather than catch up on their history, re-invent things that have been standard for decades.

As you get more experience in this industry (in my case, 30+ years worth) you start to see this more and more. Something to do with the cyclomatic complexity of comp-sci history, in my opinion ..

It's an interesting phenomenon. Personally, I find that the longer I mess around with ∗nix, the more I rely on older tools (e.g. man pages instead of google, coreutils bins instead of other specific tools, etc.)

This also has the side effect of stoking my interest in the history of ∗nix and computing in general. It's kind of fun tracing posix arcana, terminal voodoo, or whatever back to it's, often haphazard, historical origins.

The story of why we have /usr/{bin,lib,sbin} etc is somewhat infamous. A cute one is how sed is a portmanteau of 's' and 'ed' from the 's' (substitute) command in ed, and grep is similarly shorthand for the "global" command 'g/RE/p' where RE stands for "regular expression".

Anyway, I ramble.

I usually feel bad telling somebody he's spent 6 months re-inventing either Expect or Inetd (for some reason it's those two more often than anything else). But it's ultimately for the best to tell them.

Many, many good things come from re-invention in our world. I only wish there were a longer-term awareness .. because there is a devolutionary angle, where people sort of forget why its important to do/not-do things certain ways, and end up leading us all into the abyss; cf- encryption, video games, internet, etc.

I'm not sure if the tech is under developed or whether we just hit a local maximum, but in the 80's I would have thought that we'd be free of the need for voice actors before we got CG actors. During the 90's the exact opposite happened, we got fully CG movies but still needed humans for the vocals.

It's also amusing that we discovered it wasn't a compelling means of user interaction 20-30 years before siri.

…when you’re sitting next to a keyboard, quality is on the “I’m surprised it works at all” level, and when speech recognizers do not really exist (it was at least a decade later that we had ones that had to be trained for hundreds of hours for each speaker, and still were bad when there was background noise)

Nowadays, I think speech interaction has its place. If we get butler-level AI (where the machine knows what you want without you even telling it what you think you want), it will get away again, but that’s a big if.

That is interesting. As far as I know, all human-realistic CG actors are controlled by human actors, though. Kind of how an artist can take human voices and morph them into other voices for characters.

The first computer I used with speech synthesis was an Amiga 1000 in 1985. However, it wasn't anything you would confuse with a human voice - early speech synthesis sounded very artificial and required phonetic input for (relatively) good results. I think there were chips specifically for speech synthesis pretty early, too, that were used in lower-cost devices than microcomputers.

eg. Votrax SC-01, and friends. See Doug McIlroy's paper "Synthetic English speech by rule", Bell Telephone Laboratories CSTR #14 (1974) (available from http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/pubs.html)

The paper about the Unix speech implementation: https://archive.org/details/synthetic-english-speech

From the documentation of the speak command:

Speak turns a stream of words into utterances and outputs them to a voice synthesizer ,or to a specified out-put file.

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