High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Wolfgang von Kempelen`s Speaking Machine is a manually-operated speech synthesizer that began development in 1769, by Austro-Hungarian author and inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen. It was in this same year that he completed his far more infamous contribution to history: The Turk, a chess-playing automaton, later revealed to be a very far-reaching and elaborate hoax due to the chess-playing human-being occupying its innards. But while the Turk’s construction was completed in six months, Kempelen’s Speaking Machine occupied the next twenty years of his life. After two conceptual “dead ends” over the first five years of research, Kempelen’s third direction ultimately led him to the design he felt comfortable deeming “final”: a functional representational model of the human vocal tract.