AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Before Siri spoke up as the iPhone's digital assistant or the Amazon Echo was taking requests in people's homes, there was the granddaddy of all talking devices.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Helen (ph), will you have the Voder say, greetings everybody?
COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE: Greetings, everybody.
KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
(Laughter) Everybody that robotic voice is the Voder - V-O-D-E-R - full name - voice-operating demonstrator. It was developed by an engineer, Homer Dudley, at Bell Labs about 90 years ago.
ERIC GRUNDHAUSER: It's interesting as a stepping stone, in terms of the speech synthesis that we experience every day now.
CORNISH: That's Eric Grundhauser, a staff writer for Atlas Obscura.
GRUNDHAUSER: To create this synthetic speech, you had have an operator who was working the Voder, not unlike an ultra-complicated piano or organ.
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UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Well, for example, in producing the word concentration on the Voder, I have to form 13 different sounds in succession.
MCEVERS: In this promotional film, the female Voder operator presses down on what looks like piano keys. There were also foot pedals. Learning to manipulate them to produce words was not easy.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: About how long it take you to become an expert in operating the Voder?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: It took me about a year of constant practice.
MCEVERS: Remember that the next time you get frustrated trying to learn how to use a new digital device.
CORNISH: In any case, Grundhauser says the Voder was never marketed to the public.
GRUNDHAUSER: They were always meant as sort of an experiment, as a - as a show piece.
CORNISH: The Voder appeared in public only twice - at the 1939 World's Fair in New York and at an exposition in San Francisco the same year.
MCEVERS: And although the Voder was considered revolutionary at the time, none of the machines are known to have survived.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Suppose you sing a song for us?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AULD LANG SYNE")
COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE: (Singing) Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought...
MCEVERS: Unlike today's devices, the Voder was far too big, far too complicated to make it into our lives.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AULD LANG SYNE")
COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE: (Singing) Should auld acquaintance be forgot and auld lang syne. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.