Today, AI is so good at imitating human speech that it takes only three seconds to snag someone’s voice and copy it, producing a result that would fool the speaker’s mother. In 1941, Boiseans were treated to a demonstration of machine-generated speech that wasn’t anywhere near perfection.

“Pedro the Voder” was a mechanism developed by Bell Labs to create speech mimicking the human voice. A Voice Operation Demonstrator (VODER) operator put on a show at the Boise High School auditorium on two nights in September.

What the audience saw and heard was an operator at a keyboard typing in symbols that came out as speech from a speaker. Adjustments while typing could make the speech male or female, and young or old. In addition to a keyboard, there was a wrist bar and foot pedal with which the operator could modify the speech.

Boise wasn’t the first demonstration of the Voder. It had appeared at the 1939 World’s Fair and the Golden Gate International Exposition.
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The Voder, nicknamed Pedro for Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro, who allegedly exclaimed "My God! It talks!" upon hearing a telephone for the first time, seemed to be an end in itself, with little possibility that it might be a peek into the future.
Nevertheless, it was entertaining. It still is. Check out this YouTube demonstration.
 
A VODER operator at work.