An expert on voice recognition and speech technologies responds to Ysabelle Cheung’s “Galatea.” When Joseph Faber invented the Euphonia, a mid-19th century analog voice synthesizer, people weren’t impressed. They found Faber’s invention to be a strange device with little to no purpose. (It eventually found a home in P.T. Barnum’s circus). In an attempt to create a machine that could mimic human speech, Faber was physically tethered to his invention, manipulating its bellows, gears, and hardware to produce human-like utterances—from short speeches to ghostly renditions of “God Save the Queen”—with a flat affect. One version of the machine was designed...