Voder

"Say 'each.' "

"Each."

"Say 'patience.' "

"Patience."

"Say, 'Patience is necessary.' "

"Patience is necessary."

"Say, 'Oh, yeah.' "

"Oh, yeah."

This curious colloquy took place last week in Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, where engineers of Bell Telephone Laboratories and a trained operator demonstrated a complicated electronic device called Voder (short for "voice operation demonstrator"). Voder creates a variety of sounds resembling human speech closely enough to be easily intelligible. It is intended to flabbergast, enlighten and amuse visitors to this year's world's fairs in San Francisco and New York City.

The Bell Telephone demonstrators took pains to make it clear that Voder does not reproduce speech, like a telephone receiver or loudspeaker. It originates speech at the touch of an operator, synthesizing sounds to form words. The men who built it were able to do so because in their telephone researches they had made a close study of how speech sounds are made by the human larynx, mouth, breath, tongue, teeth and lips. With electrical filters, attenuators, frequency changers, etc. they found that they could produce 23 basic sounds; that intelligible speech could be synthesized from various combinations of these sounds, controlled by a skilled operator manipulating a keyboard and foot pedal.

The machine's possible sound combinations are so various that Voder can imitate the inflections, overtones and shading of human diction. By altering pitch it can change from a man's voice to a woman's or a child's. It can mimic animal sounds, locomotive whistles, the noise of an airplane engine.

Since the fluent production of speech on a keyboard is not so simple as pounding a typewriter, Bell Telephone picked 24 of the cleverest telephone operators from 300 candidates, gave them about twelve months' intensive training as Voder operators. Like concert pianists, they have to keep in trim by practicing several hours a day. The most difficult speech component they must coax out of Voder, and the one that sounds least natural, is the letter l. When someone at last week's demonstration asked for the words "Bell Telephone," they came out something like "Behrw Tehwephone."

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