Speak, Spell, Touch, Tell: A History of Mobile Talking Machines

• In Event: Reuse, Revision, and Repurposing: Across the Lifespan of Digital Communication Technologies, Infrastructures, and Practices

Abstract

Though disability is largely underrepresented in the written history of computing and engineering, it has played, and continues to play, a significant role in how digital media augment and provide alternatives to human communication and expression. In this presentation, I argue that late twentieth century developments in synthetic speech, mobile computing, and assistive technology are inherently intertwined through their research, development, commercialization, use, and reuse. Specifically, I explore connections between the Texas Instruments Vocaid and the Apple iPad, two mobile communication devices with speech output capabilities produced 30 years apart by major commercial electronics companies. Each can be characterized, in whole or in part, as an electronic augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device. Electronic AAC systems provide individuals with significant expressive language impairments (most famously, Stephen Hawking) with tools for communicating through digitized and/or synthetic speech. At the dawn of the PC era in the late 1970 and early 1980s, the Vocaid reworked T.I.’s advancements in microcomputing, particularly the Speak & Spell and Touch & Tell toys. In turn, circuit bending hackers and hobbyists later appropriated the Vocaid for artistic purposes. The iPad, as an AAC device, also remediates the Vocaid, not only in terms of its design and functionality, but also through a shared legacy of challenges experienced by individuals with disabilities over private and public funding for these assistive technologies. In sum, the Vocaid, Touch & Tell, and Speak & Spell join devices such as portable televisions and radios in an extended lineage of mobile communication technologies, of which the iPad is only the latest development. Moreover, the history of electronic AAC devices sheds light on the inexorable but understudied links between the history of digital communication technologies and disability history.

Author

• Meryl Alper, U of Southern California - Annenberg School for Communication