Euphonia: The Creepy Robotic Head That Turned Text into Speech

The idea of a talking head in the 19th century automatically makes us think of things like horror stories or circuses, but what we have here today might be one of the first examples of mechanized text-to-speech. Identified as Euphonia, this machine used technology similar to that of pianos to imitate the human voice, and with a skillful enough operator, it could change its accent, or even sing pieces in the style of "God Save the Queen."

The earliest records of the Euphonia machine take us to December, the approximate date of its debut at the Musical Fund Hall. There it captured the interest of different figures, among which stands out Joseph Henry, creator of the electric relay that would later serve as the basis for the technology behind the telegraph. In those years, Henry was also a kind of "fraud hunter", but upon seeing Euphonia working in a private demonstration, he called it a "wonderful invention", and saw enormous potential in it, starting with the possibility of two Euphonias connected remotely, as a kind of super-telegraph.

How did Euphonia work?

Euphonia required 25 years of research from its inventor Joseph Faber, and its final design was based on a total of 16 or 18 keys (records vary) that controlled the movements of the jaw, tongue, and lips, while the equivalent of lungs and larynx were a bellows and an ivory tube.

The "accent" of Euphonia could be altered with the turn of a screw or the insertion of a small tube into its "nose," a fundamental aspect for the machine to express itself in other languages. Even so, this marvel of engineering did not have the impact Faber expected, and only the words of encouragement from Henry and other figures like P. T. Barnum led him to London to exhibit his creation in the Egyptian Hall of the British Museum.

Despite interacting with the public and doing things like singing "God Save the Queen," its reception was very poor. The main reasons given are two: Faber was not a great "salesman" of his work nor did he care much about his appearance, and Euphonia itself would have been one of the first victims of the Uncanny Valley.

Of course, any additional reference to Euphonia's verbal ability cannot go beyond the anecdotal simply because no recordings of its voice exist, but the available documentation and the names involved seem solid enough to say that it was not a hoax. Faber died at some point in the 1860s (apparently he committed suicide), but his work did have consequences, including impressing a certain Melville Bell... the father of Alexander Graham Bell...

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