What characterized the primary technique in Pre-2000s voice synthesis aiming for synthetic speech?

Answer

Concatenative Synthesis involving piecing together recorded snippets of phonemes

The early synthesis efforts, preceding the AI leap, relied heavily on a technique called Concatenative Synthesis. This method involved physically piecing together recorded snippets that represented phonemes, which are the fundamental sound units of human speech. While this was a groundbreaking method for making machines speak for the first time, the resulting audio output often sounded robotic because it lacked the natural flow and necessary emotional nuance characteristic of human speech, indicating its focus was functional speech output rather than identity replication.

What characterized the primary technique in Pre-2000s voice synthesis aiming for synthetic speech?
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