Electronic devices that talk with many voices.
If you've spent more than a few minutes with a Speak&Math you may have noticed that one voice sample that doesn't match the others – the clip announcing the game "Greater Than / Less Than". It sounds like a whole different person recorded it because... that's what happened. (For the curious, http://www.99er.net/spkmath.html explains!) This was a haunting fascination for a much younger me.
Fast forward nearly four decades to now; the device in question is a cheap but perfectly functional Bluetooth adapter for my headphones. Most of the voice clips ("device on", "power low", and so on) are kinda low-quality, noisy, trimmed-too-short recordings of someone with a difficult-to-place North American accent... but one or two clips sound like they were recorded with a somewhat improved setup a feature a wholly different voice with a British accent. Nowadays, this doesn't seem wondrous so much as careless, but it's still fascinating.
Anyone got any other interesting examples of this multiple-voice phenomenon?
Electronic devices that talk with many voices.
@mmsword @ElectricKeet My first programming internship was at a place that built automated telephony systems for customers. I've seen the digital sausage being made here. It's pretty amazing.
And by amazing I mean terrifying.
Electronic devices that talk with many voices.
@ElectricKeet Google voice does this a lot. It'll switch between a fairly natural voice and 90s text to speech voice.
re: Electronic devices that talk with many voices.
@Doephin I can't decide if that's surprising to me or not. I feel like Google products are one big psychological experiment to start with.
Electronic devices that talk with many voices.
@ElectricKeet Way back when I was in college, there was TEX, the Texas Education Exchange, an automated telephony system for enrollment at the University of Texas at Austin. I don't recall that it had multiple people, but the _numbers_ were so obviously voice samples that hadn't been carefully screened, so ZERO had this really strained cadence and pitch compared to the rest. It stuck out in ways that fascinated me.