Vox ex Machina

How today’s digital devices got their voices, and how we learned to listen to them. From early robots to toys like the iconic Speak & Spell to Apple’s Siri, Using a wide range of intriguing examples, A beautifully written book that will appeal to anyone with a healthy skepticism toward Silicon Valley, <Vox Ex Machina< is an important and timely contribution to our cultural histories of information, computing, and media.

Autorentext

Sarah A. Bell

Klappentext

"By documenting how voice synthesis developed over the course of the 20th century, as well as the cultural imagination that emerged around new talking machines as they were introduced, this book shows how synthetic voices index the complicated and sometimes paradoxical relationships that people have with increasingly lifelike digital technologies"--

Inhalt
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Introduction
1&#160;&#160;&#160;Voder (1939)
2&#160;&#160;&#160;Electronic Vocal Tract (1950)
3&#160;&#160;&#160;Am-Quote (1964)
4&#160;&#160;&#160;Speak & Spell (1978)
5&#160;&#160;&#160;Perfect Paul (1979)
6&#160;&#160;&#160;S.A.M. the Software Automatic Mouth (1982)
Epilogue: When Will Siri Laugh?
Notes
Index