Talking clock

Soon after Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph, the earliest attempts to make a clock that incorporated a voice were made.

[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.

The tiny controls to turn off alarm or set functions are hard to reach under a small bottom lid.

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.

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.

In addition, one manufacturer purportedly produced a clock that would announce the time upon detecting a user's whistling signal.

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.

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.

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.

Dr. Mark McKinley, the president of the International Society of Talking Clock Collectors, proposes three possible explanations for this phenomenon.