Have you ever heard a computer talk to you?  More than likely, in some form or another, the answer to that question is yes.  If so, then you have experienced a voice synthesizer.  The tricky thing is in figuring out how the programming works and is able to take characters on the screen and turn them into spoken words.

Programming and devices to create human speech are nothing new.  There is actually documentation going back almost 1,000 years of individuals who have tried to create something that could emulate the spoken word.  A real dent was made in the late 1700’s, but that pretty much fell by the wayside as it was not entirely successful.

Over the next 100 or so years, the project was picked back up and revived, but never with much success until the 1930’s when Bell Labs started working on a machine that would later be called the VOCODER.  The device was worked on further and a newer version was shown at the New York’s World Fair in the late 30’s.

Over the years, this type of programming was recognized to be the important learning tool that it has become today and much money and time were invested in making it better.  If you look at the software that was available as little as 25 years ago and compare it to what we have today, it is the equivalent of getting a man to walk on the moon.  It truly is amazing how remarkable and lifelike this programming has become.

The programming itself all starts with the text.  The software is more or less trained on recognizing certain combinations of letters and how they are translated into speech.  When the text is input into the programming, it then translates the code and the output is the spoken word.  Now realize that this really is a very simple explanation, as it hardly gives a true representation of the amount of programming that it takes to make this happen.

The result of all of this research and advanced technology is a learning tool whose significance can never be overstated.  It has increased the vocabulary of children, allowed those that cannot see to use a computer and has also made our everyday lives much easier.  While we all hate those voicemail systems that seem to send us in loop after loop, it is a far cry from what we used to experience when making customer service phone calls.  At least now we usually get somewhere.  And all of this by typing a few characters into the phone and having some programming translate it into speech.

While voice synthesizer software may be new to you, it is hardly something that is just now coming out.  The idea for the programming has been around for almost a thousand years, it is just that the rest of the technology needed had not yet caught up to the human mind that had though it up.  We are a lucky generation in that today’s technology has allowed us to make the most of this idea that first surfaced hundreds of years ago.