Vox ex Machina

A Cultural History of Talking Machines

Sarah A. Bell

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English

MIT Press
22 October 2024

Technology: general issues

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

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.

By: Sarah A. Bell
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9780262546355
ISBN 10: 0262546353
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 22 October 2024
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Sarah 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.

Reviews for Vox ex Machina: A Cultural History of Talking Machines

Included 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