reading the wikipedia page for speech synthesis i fell into a rabbit hole following the history of "brazen heads": legendary bronze objects with supernatural foresight. i noticed a number of connections to contemporary issues in AI. 
while golems and moving sculptures are typically mobile but speechless, brazen heads speak but are immobile. they don't follow the familiar plot of abusing their strength to run amok or destroy their creator.
one of the best known brazen heads was crafted by roger bacon in the 1200s, popularized in the 1500s. bacon wanted to protect england by surrounding it in a brass wall, and hoped to get advice from the head. mainlesson.com/display.php?au…
an nsa memo from 1964 references this story while discussing the significance of automating intelligence, humorously describing bacon's work as "a defense project" nsa.gov/news-features/…
this obsession with brass might have been connected to the use of brass for astronomical clockwork: timekeeping devices that, like bacon's brazen head, took years to assemble and foretold the future. books.google.com/books?id=6fk6o…
at the time, this kind of science was treated with suspicion: part of the story is that bacon had to make a deal with a demon to get the brazen head working properly. (anyone who has trained a neural net can relate to this)
there are similarities to the french pope sylvester ii (late 900s) who constructed a "yes/no" brazen head. sylvester ii made a pact with a demon, and practiced science from a "magic-book" he stole from an arab philosopher en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Devi…
bacon's story is simple: he builds the head, waits for it to speak, but falls asleep and misses it. his assistant was watching, and tells him the head said: "time is. time was. time is past" and then self-destructed. bacon is distraught by his lost work. archive.org/stream/represe…
this arc is followed fairly closely in the short film "man with a rubber head" (1901) by french director and magician georges méliès (known best for "a trip to the moon")
apparently saint albertus (also 1200s) crafted his own brazen head. thomas aquinas was studying with him, and "knocked it in pieces" because it kept interrupting his train of thought books.google.com/books?id=WR86A…
anyway, there's so much to this to history to unravel. it addresses something different than the typical "killer automata" stories. something about being misguided from the beginning, making deals with the devil, and being rewarded with nothing (or just useless chatter).
if you want to read more, i recommend these articles by @mjpcuervo and @bruces, respectively mentalfloss.com/article/502537… wired.com/2009/02/imagin…
