| Society has been fascinated and excited by the | | | | difficult to understand. Like a child learning to talk, |
| prospect of talking computers ever since | | | | computer programming had to have time to |
| computer technology began to emerge. Ask | | | | develop in order to handle some of these early |
| nearly anyone and they're sure to remember | | | | technological challenges. Converting text to voice |
| famous fictional talking computers like HAL 9000 | | | | and making the computer use proper tone, |
| from Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey | | | | inflection, and syllabic emphasis proved to be |
| and K.I.T.T., a computerized talking car from the | | | | highly difficult. |
| 80's TV show Knight Rider. Although voice | | | | Creating such a program requires countless |
| synthesizers weren't used back then to these | | | | man-hours as letter and word combinations and |
| characters, it is used today in a number of ways. | | | | other instructional sets have to be fed into the |
| Leaders in the science and technology fields have | | | | computer via code. This code then instructs the |
| been working hard to make fiction like this a | | | | computer as to how to convert this text into |
| reality for consumers. Having witnessed the | | | | understandable sound. It may sound easy but this |
| evolution of computer technology over the past | | | | technology has been developed through a lot of |
| couple of decades, it's easy to see how many | | | | trial and error. |
| strides have been made in that area in such a | | | | These days, you will see this type of technology |
| short amount of time. Because of voice | | | | used in plenty of applications. Cell phones, GPS |
| synthesizer software, talking computers are now | | | | units, eBook Readers, and even your office |
| here in a variety of forms and are more | | | | productivity software on your home computer all |
| interactive than ever. | | | | use this type of text-to-speech conversion |
| Early forms of this type of software did not | | | | software. Bridging the communication gap, voice |
| always work well and the sound output that was | | | | synthesizer software allows us to interact with |
| generated was very slow, computerized, and | | | | our technology on a much more personal level. |