Synthetic Speech Is Child’s Play

Paul Werner refused to be silenced, even though he lost his voice box because of cancer and a $300 device he used to speak quit working. A $10 electronic toy let the determined man put his thoughts into words, and speech pathologists at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, where Werner was receiving special care, now keep a supply of the toys, originally intended to make a child’s voice sound like a robot’s. “I remember when he brought it in, I just about dropped over . . .” pathologist Marsha Sullivan said. “The quality isn’t like the special devices, but it’s something they can use while they’re learning esophageal speech or while they’re deciding what’s appropriate for them.” Werner, 55, of Brookings, S.D., said some people can understand him better when he uses the robot than when he uses special devices. When a tube attached to the toy robot is placed against the tongue and words are mouthed, the toy makes sounds like a robot talking. “I don’t know of any plans to use it as anything other than a toy, even though they say it’s better than the expensive prosthetic devices,” said Jodi Heimler, a public relations spokeswoman for Nasta Industries of New York, maker of the robot, called the “Electronic Voice Synthesizer.”

--The emergency room staff at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence has also been toying around, but patients seem to be bearing up well. About 200 injured toys were treated at the free Teddy Bear Clinic sponsored by the American College of Emergency Physicians. “The idea is to use play to help alleviate the anxiety children feel about hospital procedures,” child behavioral specialist Barbara Devens said as she prepared a blue-eyed teddy dressed in cowboy pajamas for a shot. “Shots are a big thing,” Devens said, wiping the bear’s arm with alcohol. “Some children love to give their bears shots.” Shots, nose restructuring, sutures and X-rays were just some of the services offered by the hospital, which set aside various parts of its emergency pediatrics ward for the two-hour clinic.

--Moscow’s Communist Party daily Pravda said recent tirades by New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch against the Soviet Union were the rantings of an ignorant man. Pravda did not mention U.S. reporter Nicholas Daniloff, whose arrest in Moscow on Aug. 30 prompted some of the remarks by Koch. Pravda reserved its strongest criticism for statements Koch made at a news conference during which, Pravda said, Koch described the Soviet Union as equivalent to Nazi Germany. “A man who knows the least bit about Nazi Germany would hardly resort to such sacrilegious historic parallels,” Pravda said.