Synthetic speech began in 1928, when Bell Labs engineer Homer Dudley built the Vocoder, which broke speech into signals and rebuilt it electronically. His later Voder, shaped like a piano and played with a wrist bar and pedal, was the first electronic speech synthesiser that could produce connected speech, though it sounded electrical rather than human. In the 1960s and 1970s, reading machines paired optical character recognition with speech synthesis. The Kurzweil Reading Machine, released in 1976, cost between $30,000 and $50,000. Screen readers such as JAWS, created by blind programmer Ted Henter, made computers usable for blind people, and today's voice assistants use neural networks to add natural inflection.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.