Vox ex Machina

How today’s digital devices got their voices, and how we learned to listen to them.


From early robots to toys like the iconic Speak & Spell to Apple’s Siri, Vox Ex Machina tells the fascinating story of how scientists and engineers developed voices for machines during the twentieth century. Sarah Bell chronicles the development of voice synthesis from buzzy electrical current and circuitry in analog components to the robotic sounds of early digital signal processing to today’s human sounding applications. Along the way, Bell also shows how the public responded to these technologies and asks whether talking machines are even good for us.

Using a wide range of intriguing examples, Vox Ex Machina is embedded in a wider story about people—describing responses to voice synthesis technologies that often challenged prevailing ideas about computation and automation promoted by boosters of the Information Age. Bell helps explain why voice technologies came to sound and to operate in the way they do—influenced as they were by a combination of technical assumptions and limitations, the choices of the corporations that deploy them, and the habits that consumers developed over time.

A beautifully written book that will appeal to anyone with a healthy skepticism toward Silicon Valley, Vox Ex Machina is an important and timely contribution to our cultural histories of information, computing, and media.Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Introduction
1   Voder (1939)
2   Electronic Vocal Tract (1950)
3   Am-Quote (1964)
4   Speak & Spell (1978)
5   Perfect Paul (1979)
6   S.A.M. the Software Automatic Mouth (1982)
Epilogue: When Will Siri Laugh?
Notes
IndexIncluded in the New Yorker's Best Books of 2024

“Vox ex Machina is a terrific tour of the technologies behind an artificially intelligent synthetic human voice.”
—Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

“Vox ex Machina showcases both the products of voice synthesis and the underlying technologies that made them possible. It’s a fascinating tour, particularly when Bell focuses on the ways in which the public’s reaction to these ‘talking machines’ presaged its reaction to the ‘thinking’ ones that would emerge decades later.”
—MIT Technology Review

“This is a fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable book for anyone interested in history of human-electronic machine interaction, electronic sound, communication, the history of technology, popular media, and the social implications and impact of contemporary personal electronics and digital assistants.”
—H-Net Reviews“Vox ex Machina traces the scientific, social, and cultural dynamics that shape synthesized voices as consumer products. Bell’s engaging narrative raises vital social, economic, and political questions about our interactions with artificial voice technologies.”
—Meredith A. Bak, Associate Professor of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University–Camden; author of Playful Visions
 
“Authoritative and thoughtful, Bell’s Vox ex Machina centers electronic voice synthesis as consequential technology. A history that ‘speaks’ to the deeper motivations and repercussions of language simulation in the computer age.”
—Andrew Meade McGee, Curator of Computing, Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum
 
“A thought-provoking history at the intersection of technology and popular culture.”
—Joseph Turow, author of The Voice CatchersSarah A. Bell is a writer and professor who studies the impacts of information technologies on society. She earned a PhD in Communication from the University of Utah in 2015.