What crucial capability did the rudimentary acoustic devices like 'talking tubes' in the 18th and 19th centuries fundamentally lack compared to later synthesized speech?
Answer
Any true text-to-speech capability.
The very earliest attempts to create artificial voices, often involving mechanical apparatuses like 'talking tubes' or other acoustic devices from the 18th and 19th centuries, were primarily mechanical curiosities designed to produce sound through physical manipulation of air and gears. While they demonstrated a fascination with artificial voice, they were extremely rudimentary. They could perhaps produce some simple, intelligible sounds when carefully adjusted, but they completely lacked the sophisticated infrastructure necessary to translate written input (text) into synthesized speech, a feature that would only become a focus much later with electrical engineering breakthroughs.
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