I just came across this video on the DECtalk, an early and famous speech-to-text synthesizer. (It was used by Stephen Hawking, among many other things.) And then I wondered if I could use it on my modern, decidedly-not-Windows-NT computer. And the answer is: yes! Huzzah!
I found two versions of the DECtalk software. The first one appears to be a bit more modern. Here’s where you can find it, at least at the time of this post. (If this link breaks at some point, feel free to contact me and ask for these files…I’m sure I’ll have them.)
Here’s what seems to be an older model. This one has Whispering Wendy, an all-time favorite of mine. I made her say some existential and disturbing stuff, of course.
(Unfortunately, the newer version won’t let me export a wav file for comparison.)
You might recognize Wendy from the track “How Does It Make You Feel” on Air’s incredible album 10,000 Hz Legend. (They may have tweaked one of the other voices to be more whisper-y, but it’s really similar.)
Here are the two interfaces for the older and newer version.
If you came this far, here’s a bonus sample for you Air fans out there:
And as a final, FINAL bonus, here’s Perfect Paul singing Aura Lee:
A fun Saturday morning, all in all!