“PEDRO” - THE FIRST MACHINE THAT REALLY TALKS (Apr, 1939)
Vote for Pedro!
“PEDRO”
THE FIRST MACHINE THAT REALLY TALKS
Voice-Operation Demonstrator Crowns Centuries of Effort by Scientists to Duplicate Human Speech ArtificiallyHE HASN’T any mouth, lungs, or larynx-but he talks a blue streak. His name is Pedro the Voder, and you may see him in action at the New York and San Francisco world’s fairs. His creation from vacuum tubes and electrical circuits, by Bell Telephone Laboratories engineers, crowns centuries of effort to duplicate the human voice.
To manufacture Pedro’s conversation, his operator employs a keyboard like that of an old-fashioned parlor organ. Thirteen black and white keys, fingered one or more at a time, produce all the vowels and consonants of speech. Another key regulates the loudness of the synthetic voice, which comes from a loudspeaker. A foot pedal varies the inflection meanwhile; so that the same sentence may state a fact or ask a question.






