The Voder: 1939, the worlds first electronic voice synthesizer

The Voder was the worlds first voice electronic synthesizer. In 1939 Homer Dudley working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey began to publicly demonstrate the Voder, the first electronic device that could generate continuous human speech electronically.

The Voder was designed for the 1939 World Fair in New York as a showcase of the advanced work being done at Bell Laboratories.  It was a manually operated system requiring training, ten finger, two foot paddles, a knee leaver and arm switch to generate sounds. The sounds quality actually was better than most voice synthesizers all the way up to the late 1990s.

This is audio from a radio program recorded live during the broadcast.

• #science_technology
• #voice_first
• #voice_synthesizer
• #voder