A talking clock (also called a speaking clock and an auditory clock) is a timekeeping device that presents the time as sounds. It may present the time solely as sounds, such as a phone-based time service (see "Speaking clock") or a clock for the visually impaired, or may have a sound feature in addition to an analog or digital face.
Although they would not be considered to be speaking, clocks have incorporated noisemakers such as clangs, chimes, gongs, melodies, and the sounds of cuckoos or roosters from almost the beginning of the mechanical clock. Soon after Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph, the earliest attempts to make a clock that incorporated a voice were made. Around 1878, Frank Lambert invented a machine that used a voice recorded on a lead cylinder to call out the hours. Lambert used lead in place of Edison's soft tinfoil. In 1992, the Guinness Book of World Records recognized this as the oldest known sound recording that was playable [1] (though that status now rests with a phonautogram of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, recorded in 1857). It is on display at the National Watch and Clock Museum in Columbia, Pennsylvania.
Although there have been rumors that other talking clocks may have been produced afterward, it is not until around 1910 that another talking clock was introduced, when Bernhard Hiller created a clock that used a belt with a recording on it to announce the time.[ citation needed ] However, these belts were often broken by the hand-tightening required, and all attempts to reproduce the celluloid ribbon have so far failed.
In 1933, the first practical use of talking clocks was seen when Ernest Esclangon created a talking telephone time service in Paris, France. On its first day, February 14, 1933, more than 140,000 calls were received. London began a similar service three years later. This type of talking time service is still around, and more than a million calls per year are received for the NIST's Telephone Time-of-Day Service. [2]
In 1954, Ted Duncan, Inc., released the Hickory Dickory Clock, a crank toy intended for children. This clock used a record, needle, and tone arm to produce its sound.
In 1968, the first truly portable talking clock, the Mattel-a-Time Talking Clock, was released.
In 1979, Sharp released the world's first quartz-based talking clock, the Talking Time CT-660E (German version CT-660G). Its silver transistor-radio-like case contained complex LSI circuitry with 3 SMD ICs (likely clock CPU, speech CPU and sound IC), producing a Speak&Spell-like synthetic voice. At the front rim was a small LCD. The alarm spoke the time and also had a melody "Boccherini's Minuet"; after 5 minutes the alarm repeated with the words "Please hurry!". It also had stopwatch and countdown timer modes. The tiny controls to turn off alarm or set functions are hard to reach under a small bottom lid. [3] [4]
In 1984, the Hattori Seiko Co. released their famous pyramid-shaped talking clock, the Pyramid Talk. As a futuristic design object even its LCD was hidden at the bottom, requiring the user to push the clock's top to hear it talk.
Current talking clocks often include many more features than just giving the time; in these, the ability to speak the time is part of a wide range of voice capabilities, such as reading the weather and other information to the user.
After the telephone time service, the next practical application of the talking clock was in the teaching of timetelling to children. The first talking clock to be used for this purpose was the Mattel "Mattel-a-Time Talking Clock" of 1968. Several other clocks of this type followed, including one featuring Thomas the Tank Engine. One of the latest ones, the "Talking Clever Clock", includes a quiz button which asks questions such as "What time is it?", "What time will it be in an hour?", and "How much time has passed between 1:00 and 2:30?" Other educational talking clocks come in a kit designed to be assembled by children.
Talking clocks can also be used with children whose learning disabilities may be partially offset by the reinforcement provided by hearing the time as well as seeing it.
Talking clocks have found a natural home as an assistive technology for people who are blind or visually impaired. There are over 150 tabletop clocks and 50 types of watches that talk. Manufacturers of such clocks include Sharp, Panasonic, RadioShack, and Reizen. In addition, one manufacturer purportedly produced a clock that would announce the time upon detecting a user's whistling signal.[ citation needed ]
Many companies have used talking clocks as a novelty item to promote their brand. In 1987, the H. J. Heinz Company released a clock with the figure of "Mr. Aristocrat", a tomato with a motif similar to Mr. Peanut. At alarm time, the clock said, "It's time to get up; get up right away! Wait any longer and it's 'ketchup' all day! Remember, Heinz is the thick rich one." At roughly the same time, Pillsbury created a similar clock with the character of Little Sprout. In recent years, the Coca-Cola polar bear, the Red and Yellow M&M's characters, the Pillsbury Doughboy, a Campbell's Soup girl, and others have at one time appeared on a talking clock. One of the more interesting branded clocks was produced by Energizer and was a soft, battery-shaped clock whose alarm was turned off by punching it or throwing it against a hard surface.
The inexpensiveness of modern speech technology has allowed manufacturers to include talking clock capabilities into a wide range of products. Many of these are intended as conversation pieces or speak merely for the entertainment of hearing sounds or words spoken by an inanimate object. Such timepieces include Darth Vader clocks, calculators with time features, and even a painting of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper that announces the time on the hour along with a quote from Jesus.
Other themes of talking timepieces include fortune-telling, astrology, clocks with moving lips, animated creatures, sports and athletes, and movies, among others.
Most modern talking clocks are based on speech-synthesis integrated circuits that generate speech from sampled, stored data. The rapid technological progress of the 1980s enabled today's high-quality talking products. Early talking clocks employed chips that linked phonemes to generate speech. These products could generate unlimited speech, but it was of relatively poor quality that sounded robotic, at worst, unintelligible. Today's higher-quality speech is produced by sampled-data systems that take elements of an actual human voice. Modern voice synthesis technologies can produce synthesized vocabularies that retain the style of the speaker exactly and are not limited to just perfect English, but can be as varied as Scottish accents, Japanese, and even the voice of a young child. Such voices are all generated using tiny, inexpensive voice chips that are readily available.
Almost all of the latest voice-chipped talking clocks incorporate the female human voice to announce the time. Dr. Mark McKinley, the president of the International Society of Talking Clock Collectors, proposes three possible explanations for this phenomenon. The female voice may be considered more soothing psychologically; it may be a relic of the female voice being historically associated with secretarial (Administrative Assistant) functions; or a feminine voice may possibly simply be softer in a less intrusive way. [5]
Many talking clocks include a light sensor or a setting that will automatically silence them between certain hours (usually between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m.).
Many talking clocks of the 1970s utilized an Ozen box, which is a mechanism similar to a phonograph, in which a needle-like stylus tracks on a 2.25 inch platter similar to a vinyl phonograph record. The Janex Corporation produced most of the clocks which use this device, and they are highly prized among collectors.
A very large number of popular characters have appeared on talking clocks. The following list is not exhaustive, nor is it intended to be — the International Society of Talking Clocks Collectors (ISTCC) has a Museum collection of over 800 talking clocks.
The Intellivision is a home video game console released by Mattel Electronics in 1979. The name is a portmanteau of "intelligent television". Development began in 1977, the same year as the launch of its main competitor, the Atari 2600. In 1984, Mattel sold its video game assets to a former Mattel Electronics executive and investors, eventually becoming INTV Corporation. Game development ran from 1978 to 1990, when the Intellivision was discontinued. From 1980 to 1983, more than 3.75 million consoles were sold. As per Intellivision Entertainment the final tally through 1990 is somewhere between 4.5 and 5 million consoles sold.
A phonograph, later called a gramophone, and since the 1940s a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue reproduction of recorded sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones.
A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into electronic signals that are transmitted via cables and other communication channels to another telephone which reproduces the sound to the receiving user. The term is derived from Greek: τῆλε and φωνή, together meaning distant voice. A common short form of the term is phone, which came into use early in the telephone's history. Nowadays, phones are almost always in the form of smartphones or mobile phones, due to technological convergence.
A vocoder is a category of speech coding that analyzes and synthesizes the human voice signal for audio data compression, multiplexing, voice encryption or voice transformation.
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process is speech recognition.
A ringtone is the sound made by a telephone to indicate an incoming telephone call. Originally referring to the sound of electromechanical striking of bells or gongs, the term refers to any sound by any device alerting of an incoming call.
WWV is a shortwave radio station, located near Fort Collins, Colorado. It has broadcast a continuous time signal since 1945, and implements United States government frequency standards, with transmitters operating on 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20 MHz. WWV is operated by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), under the oversight of its Time and Frequency Division, which is part of NIST's Physical Measurement Laboratory based in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
WWVH is the callsign of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology's shortwave radio time signal station located at the Barking Sands Missile Range, in Kekaha, on the island of Kauai in the state of Hawaii.
A speaking clock or talking clock is a live or recorded human voice service, usually accessed by telephone, that gives the correct time. The first telephone speaking clock service was introduced in France, in association with the Paris Observatory, on 14 February 1933.
SIGSALY was a secure speech system used in World War II for the highest-level Allied communications. It pioneered a number of digital communications concepts, including the first transmission of speech using pulse-code modulation.
Chatty Cathy was a pull-string "talking" doll originally created by Ruth and Elliot Handler and manufactured by the Mattel toy company from 1959 to 1965. The doll was first released in stores and appeared in television commercials beginning in 1960, with a suggested retail price of $18.00, though usually priced under $10.00 in catalog advertisements. Chatty Cathy was on the market for six years and was the second most popular doll of the 1960s after Barbie.
The AY-3-8910 is a 3-voice programmable sound generator (PSG) designed by General Instrument (GI) in 1978, initially for use with their 16-bit CP1610 or one of the PIC1650 series of 8-bit microcomputers. The AY-3-8910 and its variants were used in many arcade games—Konami's Gyruss contains five—and Bally pinball machines as well as being the sound chip in the Intellivision and Vectrex video game consoles, and the Amstrad CPC, Oric-1, Colour Genie, Elektor TV Games Computer, MSX, and later ZX Spectrum home computers. It was also used in the Mockingboard and Cricket sound cards for the Apple II and the Speech/Sound Cartridge for the TRS-80 Color Computer.
The Intellivoice Voice Synthesis Module, commonly abbreviated as Intellivoice, is an adapter for the Intellivision, Mattel's home video game console, that utilizes a voice synthesizer to generate audible speech. The Intellivoice is a large, brown cartridge that plugs into the Intellivision's side-mounted cartridge slot; games specifically designed for the device can then be inserted into a slot provided on the right-hand side of the module.
See 'n Say is an educational toy created by Mattel in 1964 after the success of Chatty Cathy. It was the first Mattel talking toy allowing children to choose the exact phrase as heard. Although the first release focuses on farm animal sounds, it had spawned through many themes from the alphabet, counting, nursery rhymes, to licensed products.
DECtalk was a speech synthesizer and text-to-speech technology developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1983, based largely on the work of Dennis Klatt at MIT, whose source-filter algorithm was variously known as KlattTalk or MITalk.
A dictation machine is a sound recording device most commonly used to record speech for playback or to be typed into print. It includes digital voice recorders and tape recorder.
ESS Technology Incorporated is a private manufacturer of computer multimedia products, Audio DACs and ADCs based in Fremont, California with R&D centers in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada and Beijing, China. It was founded by Forrest Mozer in 1983. Robert L. Blair is the CEO and President of the company.
The Volta Laboratory and the Volta Bureau were created in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., by Alexander Graham Bell.
Quartz clocks and quartz watches are timepieces that use an electronic oscillator regulated by a quartz crystal to keep time. This crystal oscillator creates a signal with very precise frequency, so that quartz clocks and watches are at least an order of magnitude more accurate than mechanical clocks. Generally, some form of digital logic counts the cycles of this signal and provides a numerical time display, usually in units of hours, minutes, and seconds.
GI SP0256 refers to a family of closely related NMOS LSI chips manufactured by General Instrument in the early 1980s, able to model the human vocal tract by a software programmable digital filter, creating a digital output converted into an analog signal through an external low-pass filter. The SP0256 includes 2 KB of mask ROM. The various versions of SP0256 differ primarily in the voice data programmed into their mask ROMs.