Vox ex Machina: A Cultural History of Talking Machines

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, Vox Ex Machina tells the fascinating story of how scientists and engineers developed voices for machines during the twentieth century. Sarah Bell chronicles the development of voice synthesis from buzzy electrical current and circuitry in analog components to the robotic sounds of early digital signal processing to today’s human sounding...