Early Computer Speech Synthesis

The first computer-based speech synthesis systems were created in the late 1950s, and the first complete text-to-speech system was completed in 1968. In 1961, physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr and colleague Louis Gerstman used an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech, an event among the most prominent in the history of Bell Labs. Kelly’s voice recorder synthesizer (vocoder) recreated the song “Daisy Bell“, with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews. Coincidentally, Arthur C. Clarke was visiting his friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility. Clarke was so impressed by the demonstration that he used it in the climactic scene of his screenplay for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the HAL 9000 computer sings the same song as it is being put to sleep by astronaut Dave Bowman. Despite the success of purely electronic speech synthesis, research is still being conducted into mechanical speech synthesizers.