LOL. The intersection of language and machine can be fascinating.

Two anecdotes come to mind:

1. There's a story out there - don't remember the author's name and he hasn't written much and you used to could find the story out there but I haven't been able to in a while as I check every so often - but "Cax6ton" will find info about it and him. It was a really great sci-fi short story (reminding me of the stories from the likes of Asimov and that timeframe) of a kid growing up and having escalating experiences of finding order in random chaos (for example, generating random letters and looking for words). I won't spoil the ending, but it was a really nice story.

2. My dad used to work on telephone testing equipment, and back in the 80s, there was a device they would use - DECTalk - basically you could connect it to the computer via serial cable and use a terminal to send it commands and text, and it would do text-to-speech. It was relatively primative, but the tech is in a lot of 90s-2000s+ text-to-speech that you'll find on computers (Windows/Mac). Well, I'd spend hours writing things for it to say - oh hey, found someone has put it up on the web: https://dectalk.de/webspeak - oh, this is nostalgic!

Some phrases that amused the SHIT out of me as a twelve year old in 1987:

• abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
• taioueoiaueoiauoieuaioeuioaueoiauoeiuaioeaoiueoiaueoiuaoeuoaiueoiaueoiaueioua

Huh. On the physical DECTalk I played with, if you sent JUSt the vowels, it would pronounce them like:

• a o i u e i o a u e o i u a o i e u a o i e u i o

Actally, even that is different because it used to leave pauses between the letters, and now it speechifies them. lol.

What else? Oh, this was always a winner:

• sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit

Yeah, this version is a little different, but it is decently close. The voice is right and a lot of the cadence is, but it feels like maybe a later version than I had. lol

And yes. We were more easily entertained in those days. XD