The world of computer-generated voices has come a long way since I was a kid. Those early prototypes of text-to-speech programs were extremely clunky and sounded very much like a robot. Since then, we've been able to get a little bit more advanced and create voices with a few different inflections so that they sound a little bit more natural with programs like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. TikTok also recently added some new voice types including a truly disturbing one that sounds like an impatient New York City construction worker.

A company called Sonantic is now working to create truly realistic-sounding computer-generated voices that can be edited to have a wide range of believable human expressions, and it's kind of wild.