MACHINE THAT CAN SPEAK LIKE A HUMAN BEING.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18056, 17 January 1927, Page 9

MACHINE THAT CAN SPEAK LIKE A HUMAN BEING.

RESONATOR TUBES ARE LATEST MARVEL. (Special to the “Star.”) LONDON, November 20. Sir Richard Paget, F.P.S., lecturing to a large audience at the Regent Street Polytechnic, W., last night in aid of King Edward’s Hospital Fund, made resonator tubes fitted with artificial tongues imitate the human voice. He even made them imitate a human cold in the head. At his bidding these resonators uttered, with remarkable clearness, such sounds as “Minnie,” “Hurrah,” “Far,” “Father,” “Hullo, London, are you there?” and “Oh, Leila, I love you!” The sounds were produced mechanically, just as they” are produced with the vocal organs. When a human being has a cold, a cavity at the back of the nose becomes closed. Sir Richard closed a cavity at the back of the “nose” of the resonator and, instead of saying “Minnie,” it said “Middie.” It had been given a cold. To show that human beings could hum and whistle two different airs simultaneously', the lecturer and his daughter gave a “quartet” rendering of “Home Sweet Home,” in which the four harmony parts could be distin- 1 guished. Much of our spoken English to-dav, he declared, was a relic of barbarism. The verb “raise” or “raze,” for instance, could mean either raising a building to the skies or razing it to the ground. “Molo” could be an animal, a dark spot on the skin, or a breakwater.

The sound “right,” in its various spellings, could mean correct, to write, a religious ceremony, or an artisan The sibilants were not vocal sounds at all.

There was a great future for the nation which would improve its language to facilitate thinking. He recommended parents to teach their children to read phonetically in the first place.