Having machines talk has been a goal of inventors since the 17th century. But primitive speech synthesis systems didn't start to appear until the 1970's. In the 1980's a speech synthesis chip finally became available and I used it to make a portable "talking machine".
My HP 41 calculator fed it the instructions for speaking - you had to break down the words into phonemes and inflections and then feed them to the chip sequentially. It sounded like someone with a heavy Swedish accents. (I have an old recording of it somewhere and as soon as I find it I'll update this post so you can hear it.) I gave it "futuristic" packaging by gluing two clear cassette tape cases back to back.
Many years later, more advanced systems became available where you just type in the word and it figured out how to pronounce it. I bought one and hooked it up to my laptop and it was really cool. A radio station even hired me to record their "Call letters" using my text-to-speech machine!
