Wolfgang von Kempelen's Speaking Machine
Wolfgang von Kempelen developed one of the earliest known speech synthesis devices, a mechanical speaking machine, which could produce simple words and phrases.
1779
1939
Homer Dudley's Voder
Homer Dudley introduced the Voder (Voice Operating Demonstrator) at the 1939 New York World's Fair, demonstrating the first electronic speech synthesis device.
1950
Development of Pattern Playback
Pattern Playback, developed by Franklin S. Cooper and his team at Haskins Laboratories, could convert spectrograms into intelligible speech, advancing the understanding of speech synthesis.
1961
IBM's Shoebox and Bell Labs' Daisy Bell
IBM introduced the Shoebox, an early speech recognition system, and Bell Labs created a computer-generated version of the song "Daisy Bell," showcasing early digital speech synthesis.
1976
First Text-to-Speech System
MIT developed the first text-to-speech (TTS) system, which could convert written text into spoken words using rule-based algorithms.
1983
Introduction of DECtalk
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) released DECtalk, a widely used speech synthesis system known for its intelligibility and customization options.
1990
Festival Speech Synthesis System
The University of Edinburgh developed the Festival Speech Synthesis System, an open-source framework for building speech synthesis applications.
1998
Introduction of AT&T's Natural Voices
AT&T introduced Natural Voices, a TTS system that utilized advanced concatenative synthesis techniques to produce more natural-sounding speech.
2001
Microsoft's SAPI 5.0
Microsoft released Speech Application Programming Interface (SAPI) 5.0, standardizing TTS and speech recognition interfaces for Windows applications.
2007
Google's Text-to-Speech Service
Google launched its Text-to-Speech service, integrating speech synthesis capabilities into its suite of products and services.
2011
Apple's Siri
Apple introduced Siri, a virtual assistant with advanced speech synthesis and recognition capabilities, marking a significant milestone in consumer-facing speech technology.
2016
WaveNet by DeepMind
DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., unveiled WaveNet, a deep neural network for generating raw audio waveforms, significantly improving the quality of synthetic speech.
2018
Amazon introduced Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) for its Polly service, leveraging neural networks to produce more natural and expressive speech.
2020
OpenAI's GPT-3 and Speech Synthesis
OpenAI released GPT-3, which included advancements in natural language processing, indirectly benefiting speech synthesis applications with more coherent and contextually accurate outputs.
2023
NVIDIA demonstrated real-time speech synthesis capabilities using its advanced GPUs and deep learning models, pushing the boundaries of interactive AI applications.
