Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do

Attempts to synthesize the human voice date back to the 1700s, when scientific inventors experimented with reeds and bellows to get vowel sounds. But the most significant early advance was the Vocoder: a machine developed by Bell Labs in 1928 that transmitted speech electronically, in a kind of code, for allied forces in WWII. The Vocoder was the inspiration for author Arthur C. Clarke’s evil talking computer, Hal 9000, in the book 2001 a Space Odyssey, and a few decades later it produced trendy effects used by pop musicians like Kraftwerk.

Early robotic voices sounded robotic because they were totally robotic

In the 70 plus years that ensued, there were many new takes on speech synthesis: Texas Instruments’ Speak and Spell, the Knight Rider-esque talking cars of the 1980s (“FUEL level is LOW!”) and the voice built for physicist Stephen Hawking.

The difference between those voices and the voices of today, however, is as stark as the difference between Splenda and pure cane sugar. These early robotic voices sounded robotic because they were totally robotic. Prior to the late ‘90s, computing power just wasn’t great enough to do concatenated synthesis, where a real human voice is recorded, minutely dissected, catalogued, and reassembled. Instead, you made a computer speak by programming in a set of acoustic parameters, like you would any synthesizer.

“Those machines were simple compared to how complex the human vocal tract is,” explains Adam Wayment, VP of engineering at Cepstral (KEP-stral), a Pittsburgh, PA-based text-to-speech company that has created over 50 different voices since its inception in 2001. “Sound comes from the vocal cords, the nasal passages, leaks through the cheeks, the sides of mouth, reverberates around the tongue, all those tissues are mushy ... So the source itself isn’t a neat little square wave. It’s tissue vibrating.”

Hence the synthesizer approach produced speech that was intelligible, but not remotely human. Not even a child would be fooled into thinking they could actually chat with their Speak and Spell.

By the early 2000s, computers finally got fast enough to search through giant databases for the right combinations of new words, allowing companies to start producing natural-sounding concatenated voices. Around the same time, artificial intelligence developed to the point where computers could make increasingly sophisticated decisions with regards to language. When you say the word “wind,” for instance, do you pronounce it the way you would if saying, “the wind is blowing” or “wind” as in “wind the thread around the spool”? An adult human will make the correct determination automatically based on context. A computer must be taught about context.

Robo-voices not withstanding, the promise of text-to-speech has been evident since the dawn of personal computing — Apple even offered a text-to-speech reader in the first Mac. But it was the widespread adoption of mobile technologies and the internet that really fired up the demand for voices. The ability to access information, hands free, is a tantalizing proposition, particularly when coupled with speech recognition technology.

there is one group that is surprisingly not psyched about it: voice actors

You can see how important text-to-speech has become by watching what the tech superpowers are doing. In a letter to shareholders last November, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stressed the importance of “natural language interpretation and machine learning,” that is, the artificial intelligence technologies underlying speech. There have been a flurry of acquisitions: Google bought UK-based speech synthesis company, Phonetic Arts three years ago, and back in January, Amazon acquired Ivona, the Polish text-to-speech firm that recorded Day’s voice for the Kindle Fire.

While the tech sector gets excited about the future of speech, there is one group that is surprisingly not psyched about it: voice actors. That’s right, the very people supplying the raw materials. The reason might be they just don’t understand the implications. Although there are actors, like Day, or Allison Dufty, a voice-over actress who has done many jobs for Nuance, who are willing to speak publicly about their work, those actors are few and far between. Ironclad NDAs keep many actors from associating themselves with specific brands or products. Talent agents who have relationships with technology companies who do this work are often hush-hush, to maintain their competitive advantage. And in the absence of information, paranoia reigns supreme.

“Within our industry, text-to-speech [TTS] is seen as a threat,” says Stephanie Ciccarelli, chief marketing officer at Voices.com, an online marketplace for voice actors, and co-author of the book Voice Acting for Dummies. “They think it’s going to replace human voice actors.”

An email to one successful voice actor who has done narration for Audible books, work for Wells Fargo, NPR, AT&T, and others, got a polite but emphatic response: “The only thing I can tell you about voice actors' opinion on TTS is that we all pretty much think it's abominable… Maybe one day it'll advance to the level that 3D animation is currently in, but right now it's almost a joke.”

Voice-activated roach spray

Back at Nuance, Ward and Vazquez are excited to demo new technologies they’ve been working on. Ward explains that Nuance can weave bits of synthesized speech together with concatenated speech, and make it sound natural, and soon, he says, they’ll be able to make an entirely synthesized voice that sounds good, too. Computing power has increased to the point where it’s possible to build something that doesn’t sound like a totally fake robot voice.

“It will still be still based on a real person’s voice,” he says. Even a synthesized voice needs a model to mimic.

He and Vazquez show me a neat trick where they’re able to take acoustic qualities from one speaker’s voice, and qualities from a second person’s voice, and create an amalgamation of the two.

Another day, they demo a product that combines a speaking RSS reader with an intelligent music engine: the program can tell whether the news it’s reading is happy or sad, and selects an appropriate piece of music to play behind it, giving the performance a broadcast feel.

They latch onto the word “personalization,” throwing around ideas about how one day, we might have our Tweets read to us in the voice of the person who wrote them, or be able to walk into our home and say “it’s me,” and have our thermostat adjust to the temperature it knows we want, using speech recognition and artificial intelligence. I tell them a random anecdote about a famous piano player who once built a chair that squirted roach spray, activated when he smoked a joint, to mask the smell.

“Yeah, you could use speech recognition to spray something into the air, so your wife wouldn’t know you were smoking weed,” says Ward.

All jokes aside, this general concept doesn’t seem too far away, considering the existence of smart home technologies like Nest, a thermostat that learns what temperatures you like, and self-adjusts when you come and go. Nor does the reading of Tweets in one’s own voice: Cepstral recently created a custom pro bono TTS voice for a blind teenager based on audio recordings he did in his bedroom, proving you don’t need professional-quality recordings to get a passably decent result. CereProc (SARAH-Prock), a 12-person Edinburgh-based TTS firm that created a voice for the late film critic Roger Ebert after he lost his larynx from oral cancer, plans to launch a personal voice cloning product soon. Then all that needs to happen is that your TTS reader be able to channel the other peoples’ voices.

it would be nice if voice systems like Siri understood the users’ emotional state and reacted accordingly

But even if vanity voices don’t take off (a lot of people really hate the sound of their own voice, after all,) there still remains the promise of creating better synthetic voices that allow us to have a more fulfilling relationship with technology.

“Siri is incredibly easy to understand, but where we still need to break through a barrier is having Siri convey the emotional and social characteristics that are so important in regular speech,” says Benjamin Munson, a professor of speech, language, and hearing science at the University of Minnesota. At a bare minimum, he says, it would be nice if voice systems like Siri understood the users’ emotional state and reacted accordingly, the way a human attendant may adopt a soothing voice to deal with an enraged customer, for instance. Synthesizing so-called “paralinguistics,” that is, the social cues we communicate through language, is difficult, says Munson, but notes that academic researchers are beginning to study it.

“When I got into this industry, most of the speech synthesis market was for [automated voice mail systems], and the idea of producing a voice that could really communicate a sense of emotion and identity wasn’t important,” says Matthew Aylett, Chief Scientific Officer at CereProc. “After all, you don’t want the bank to read your balance in a sad voice if you’ve not got much money.”

But now that synthetic voices are reading blog posts and even entire Kindle books, carrying on conversations about scheduling, and telling you how to get to grandma’s house, it’s time, says Aylett, to shift out of neutral.

“R2D2 from Star Wars was always my favorite robot,” says Aylett. “He still sounded like a robot, but had great character, emotion, and sarcasm. We try to produce voices with a sense of character.”

Still stuck on the talking roach spray chair, chatting cars, and the idea of having my Twitter feed read to me in a chorus of friends’ voices, I asked Wayment from Cepstral, how important increased artificial intelligence would be for future TTS applications. He told me “very,” but then said: “but not in the way you might think.”

Recently, said Wayment, he spoke with a visually impaired customer who said: Do you know how hard it is to use a microwave? When they’re all different and have different displays? Which led Wayment to imagine a world full of talking microwaves. He paused, then said seriously: “I think the day is coming where even little devices are speaking, but we run the risk of just filling our lives with noise. It’s not going to be enough to have devices talking, they’re going to have to tell us things we need and want to know. They’ll have to have insight.”

And if they don’t, I see a new business opportunity: the synthesis of silence.