Vannevar Bush, in his paper “As We May Think”, pictured “text-to-speech” and how it is utilized in human-machine communication. A machine called a Voder was shown at World fair. A girl stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech. No human vocal chords entered into the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined some electrically produced vibrations and passed these on to a loud-speaker. In the Bell Laboratories there is the converse of this machine, called a Vocoder. The loudspeaker is replaced by a microphone, which picks up sound. Speak to it, and the corresponding keys move. This may be one element of the postulated system. Information was transformed from typed words to sound. Bush’s imagination in the 1940s has come true
