Speech synthesis is a spectrum of technologies. In the early days there really wasn't much difference between recording somebody and playing back, and using cho

Speech synthesis is a spectrum of technologies. In the early days there really wasn't much difference between recording somebody and playing back, and using chopped up phoneme recordings or words and reordering to produce speech. It's kind of like those robot voices used by telephone companies and answering machines for years, they're just a prerecording of somebody saying some words and numbers and the machine connects them back in the appropriate sequence. At finer granularity you simply record somebody saying phonemes and reconstruct them back into a voice that can say pretty much anything. Alter pitch and you can have it ask questions or sing. This technique has been around in some way for decades. Here's an excellent interview with the guy who did much of the foundational work in the field. http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-101-forrest-mozer-pioneer-in-digitized-speech http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-101-forrest-m...