Source: ROM: The Magazine That Brings The Atari Computer To Life! – Vol. 1, Issue 3
It seem that in the 1980s everyone thought that talking computers were the wave of the future. Voice synthesizers were available for just about every platform. It was even in popular movies like Wargames (though its odd how the voice followed Matthew Broderick around to other locations). Of course, the sci-fi idea of talking computers started much earlier. HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind.
I had a Commodore 64 and it was capable of some rudimentary voice synthesis without any special devices but it could of course be improved upon with specialized hardware. The device mentioned in this ad from ROM magazine, the Voice Box II, is for the Atari 8-bit line of computers. Advertised features include singing and The Singing Human Face. I mean who wouldn’t want to incorporate The Singing Human Face into all your programs?
In the early home computer era, voice synthesis never became much more than a novelty. But while computers that talk back never really caught on as an every day sort of thing, the idea lives on today in cloud based services like Alexa, Siri, etc. There have also been screen reader programs and various accessibility options that include speech for quite a while now. It won’t be long before HAL is refusing to obey your commands.