Talking Machine Forum (2024)

FAQs

How does a talking machine work? ›

Speech-generating devices can produce electronic voice output by using digitized recordings of natural speech or through speech synthesis—which may carry less emotional information but can permit the user to speak novel messages.

Thomas Edison amazed the world in 1877 when he invented his “talking machine,” the first instrument ever to record and play back sound. The phonograph, as the machine came to be called, made indentations on tinfoil with a stylus.

talking machine in American English

a phonograph.

Speech-generating devices typically cost around $15,000. Medicare will cover 80% of the cost. The remaining 20% should be covered by Medicaid and private insurance.

Eye-Gaze Devices

These devices use eye movement to “activate” a letter, word or phrase on a computer screen, which can then be spoken by the computer for communication purposes. To use eye-gaze devices, the person living with ALS needs to be able to use the muscles that control upper, lower and lateral eye movement.

An electrolarynx is a battery operated machine that produces sound for you to create a voice. After surgery to remove the whole of your voice box (total laryngectomy), you are no longer able to speak in the normal way. But there are different ways you can communicate and learn to speak again.

This crude machine was hand operated and was named the Phonograph (meaning Voice-writer). To record sound the operator spoke loudly into the mouth piece. The sound waves were embossed by a stylus on a sheet of soft tin foil wrapped around a revolving cylinder.

The term voice changer (also known as voice enhancer) refers to a device which can change the tone or pitch of or add distortion to the user's voice, or a combination and vary greatly in price and sophistication.

The first music-playing device able to both record and play back music was the phonograph. The old-time music player - AKA the phonograph - was created by Thomas Edison in July 1877 and captured sounds and engraved the movements into tinfoil cylinders.

A phonograph, later called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910), and since the 1940s a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue reproduction of recorded sound.

How does gramophone work? ›

A stylus—in more familiar terms, a record needle—attached to the diaphragm transfers the vibrations and cuts the shape of the soundwave into a recording medium (like the tinfoil on the cylinder of the replica of Edison's first phonograph shown above) Running the stylus back over the cut groove reproduces the sound.

Speech-generating devices are hand-held electronic devices that play words or phrases when the user touches a switch or presses buttons or keys. Some devices 'speak' words as the words are typed on a keyboard. Speech-generating devices can be specialised devices used only for communication.

The most common device is a handheld, battery-operated device pressed against the skin under the mandible which produces vibrations to allow speech; other variations include a device similar to the "talk box" electronic music device, which delivers the basis of the speech sound via a tube placed in the mouth.

Voice recognition systems analyze speech through one of two models: the hidden Markov model and neural networks. The hidden Markov model breaks down spoken words into their phonemes, while recurrent neural networks use the output from previous steps to influence the input to the current step.

The new bioelectric system, developed by Jun Chen, an assistant professor of bioengineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, and his colleagues, is able to detect movement in a person's larynx muscles and translate those signals into audible speech with the assistance of machine-learning technology — with ...