Get the latest tech news
“You Are My Friend”: Early Androids and Artificial Speech
Centuries before audio deepfakes and text-to-speech software, inventors in the eighteenth century constructed androids with swelling lungs, flexible lips, and moving tongues to simulate human speech. Jessica Riskin explores the history of such talking heads, from their origins in musical automata to inventors’ quixotic attempts to make machines pronounce words, converse, and declare their love.
This story seems to have originated long after Albert’s death with Alfonso de Madrigal (also known as El Tostado), a voluminous commentator of the fifteenth century, who adapted and embellished the tales of moving statues and talking brazen heads in medieval lore. In 1739, a year after Vaucanson’s duck made its public debut, a surgeon named Claude-Nicolas le Cat, published a description, now lost, of an “automaton man in which one sees executed the principal functions of the animal economy”, circulation, respiration, and “the secretions”. A last skeptic citing material difficulties was the philosopher and writer Antoine Court de Gébelin, who observed that “the trembling that spreads to all the parts of the glottis, the jigging of its muscles, their shock against the hyoid bone that raises and lowers itself, the repercussions that the air undergoes against the sides of the mouth .
Or read this on Hacker News
