"Many years ago scientists tried to develop

machines that produced speech from a

vocabulary of pre-recorded words...For very
limited messages, such as those of a “talking
clock”, this technique was usable, but for
other purposes, the quality of the speech was
so unnatural that it was practically
unintelligible."
Roach, P. (1983). English Phonetics and
Phonology. A practical course. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge.