Siri Meets Her Grandpa
Can Siri understand her forebears' FORTRAN accent?
Friday, October 03, 2014 - 09:30 AM
WNYC
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Tomorrow is the birthday of Siri, Apple's ubiquitous personal assistant since iOS 5. Although plenty of amusing siri-isms are posted all over the web,
we at the Archives decided to see if Siri could recognize the voice of
her forebears. To do this we used a 7" vinyl record of computer speech
published by Bell Labs in 1963. You can hear the amusing results above.
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Established in the year 2000, the New York Public Radio Archives are the station's physical link to its rich and storied past.
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Max V. Mathews was a computer music legend. In
1957 he created at Bell Labs MUSIC, the first music composition
program, which had several iterations through the decades. He also
experimented with electronic instruments and researched human-machine
interactions. He famously wrote the musical accompaniment to John
Kelly's voice-synthesized "Daisy Bell," performed in 1961 by an IBM 704
computer.
John Larry Kelly, Jr. was also a brilliant Bell Labs scientist, a gregarious Texan gunslinger with manifold interests. He created (with Carol Lochbaum) the speech synthesis system above, but may be best remembered for developing a gambling formula (based on Claude Shannon's information theory) called the Kelly criterion, which is now part of standard investment theory. Tragically, he died at age 41.
"Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)" was written by
English songwriter Harry Dacre in 1892. That year Dacre was visiting the
United States and complained to a friend about the duties levied on the
bike he had brought. When his friend commented that he was lucky not to
have brought with him "a bicycle built for two," (since then the duties
would double), Dacre was inspired to write the song that became his
biggest hit.
You may remember "Daisy Bell" as the song that the computer HAL 9000 creepily sings as he is powered down in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This is because the movie's screenwriter, Arthur C. Clarke, happened to hear John Kelly's speech synthesis experiment while visiting a friend at Bell Labs.
Can your personal assistant recognize the audio above? Let us know in the comments section.
Thanks to David Satkowski for the use of his shiny new iPhone 6 and to Andy Lanset for the disc.
John Larry Kelly, Jr. was also a brilliant Bell Labs scientist, a gregarious Texan gunslinger with manifold interests. He created (with Carol Lochbaum) the speech synthesis system above, but may be best remembered for developing a gambling formula (based on Claude Shannon's information theory) called the Kelly criterion, which is now part of standard investment theory. Tragically, he died at age 41.
You may remember "Daisy Bell" as the song that the computer HAL 9000 creepily sings as he is powered down in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This is because the movie's screenwriter, Arthur C. Clarke, happened to hear John Kelly's speech synthesis experiment while visiting a friend at Bell Labs.
Can your personal assistant recognize the audio above? Let us know in the comments section.
Thanks to David Satkowski for the use of his shiny new iPhone 6 and to Andy Lanset for the disc.
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Marcos Sueiro Bal
Marcos Sueiro Bal is the Senior Archivist at New York Public Radio.
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John Passmore
John Passmore is the Archives Manager at WNYC.
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