Talking Machine Invented By Japanese Scientist

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31110, 13 July 1966, Page 14

Talking Machine Invented By Japanese Scientist

C.V.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) TOKYO, July 12. A Japanese scientist has invented man’s first true talkingmachine, United Press International reported. Now he is trying to make it sound friendly.

The voice, bare of emotion, is the first human speech created by computers without the use of sounds prerecorded on tape, U.P.L said. The scientist, Eiichi Matsui,

aged 44, demonstrated his “speech synthesis machine” in his laboratory at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. The computer is six feet high, covered with stray wires and blinking, flashing lights, and a brown loudspeaker box next to it. From the loudspeaker comes the sound of human speech. The signals that make the box talk come from two electronic computers, one of which is a “brain” and the other a translator that turns the brain’s thoughts into

.speech impulses and sends them to the loudspeaker. The brain is a digital computer elsewhere in the building.

It reads the jumble of apparently meaningless letters, numbers and symbols called "computer language” in which scientists ordinarily speak to their machines, and converts it into words. The translator is an analogue device equipped to turn the words into speech. It has 17 sections, each of which represents one function of the human vocal organs running from the throat to the lips.

Mr Matsui and his team of four scholars worked for four years to develop the computer.

It took one year of study alone, based on theories of (speech that run back to the ; end of the eighteenth century, to work out how to (simulate the 17 functions of (speech in electronic terms. Another year was spent designing the computer itself, and then Hitachi, a giant Japanese electrical firm, spent two years building it. Within 10 days of the time it was completed, Mr Matsui was able to teach it 20 of the 50 basic sounds in the Japanese language, and enough words to speak about 10 simple sentences. He hopes to teach it all 50 sounds, and give it the ability to speak fluent Japanese by late this year. He is also planning, he | says, to teach it to speak men’s and women’s Japanese, how to imitate a child, and how to sound a little less surly than it does at present. After that he will start the machine on English and other foreign languages.