WFLD Channel 32 - PM Magazine Chicago - "Machines That Talk Back" (1980)

Here's a segment of PM Magazine Chicago called "Machines That Talk Back," reported by Bill Ratliff, that looks at Dallas-based Texas Instruments, the makers of "Speak & Spell" and other "talking computers."

The report begins with a snippet from the version of Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin' " that appeared in the film "Midnight Cowboy," and spotlights TI employees whose job is to replicate the human voice for use in a computer chip called "Synthetic Speech," as well as the secrets behind what's inside the computers and what they represent. Screencaps from a TI home computer are also shown at one point in the piece, as is a little girl in front of one of those computers as it describes rockets headed to the moon.

This simple (?!) technology would be a precursor to later computer programs such as Dragon's "Naturally Speaking" - not to mention some Internet programs that for many years told us "You've Got Mail!"

Introduced by Jo Ann Williams, who ends this piece with the following words of wisdom:

"Computers do save us a lot of work . . . but they'll never replace people - they don't have any feelings!"

This aired on local Chicago TV on Wednesday, November 19th 1980.

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