User blog comment:Kajiki/Nostalgic old fart ramblings/@comment-24889894-20141010231553

Some points of interest....

This is the first promo of Mac speech synthesis , from 1984. Fancy schmancy stuff.

This is an example of Microsoft Sam, which first shipped with Windows 2000. Which is more what the original MacinTalk actually sounded like. (I'm ashamed to admit that entering garbage text into the player name field in David's Backgammon was much more entertaining than playing the actual game.)

And which is probably why most of the examples of old speech synthesis you'll hear in movies and music  are MacinTalk 3 or later. It just takes Microsoft too long to catch up.

(Ironically, MacinTalk's name used to be S.A.M., or Software Automatic Mouth. Pretty sure it's a coincidence, since Microsoft Sam's software is named Narrator.)