Many clocks throughout history have used sounds such as bird noises or whistles to announce the time. However, these could not be considered to be true "Talking Clocks"; ones that use a human voice to speak the time.
Talking clock
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_clock
A talking clock (also known as a "speaking clock" or "auditory clock") is a timekeeping device that presents the time as sounds. It may present the time solely as sounds, such as a phone-based time service (see Speaking clock) or a clock for the hearing impaired, or may have a sound feature in addition to an analog or digital face.
History
Although they would not be considered to be speaking, clocks have incorporated noisemakers such as clangs, chimes, gongs, melodies, and the sounds of cuckoos or roosters from almost the beginning of the mechanical clock era. Soon after Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph, the earliest attempts to make a clock that incorporated a voice were made.
Around 1878, Frank Lambert invented a machine that used a voice recorded on a lead cylinder to call out the hours. Lambert used lead in place of Edison's soft tinfoil. In 1992, the Guinness Book of World Records recognized this as the oldest known sound recording that was playable[1] (though that status now rests with a phonautogram of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, recorded in 1857). It is on display at the National Watch and Clock Museum in Columbia, Pennsylvania.
Although there have been rumors that other talking clocks may have been produced afterward, it is not until around 1910 that another talking clock was introduced, when Bernhard Hiller created a clock that used a belt with a recording on it to announce the time. However, these belts were often broken by the hand-tightening required, and all attempts to reproduce the celluloid ribbon have so far failed.
Over twenty years later, the first practical use of talking clocks was seen when Ernest Esclangon created a talking telephone time service in Paris, France. On its first day, February 14, 1933, over 140,000 calls were received. London began a similar service three years later. This type of talking time service is still around, and over one million calls per year are received for the NIST's Telephone Time-of-Day Service[2].
In 1954, Ted Duncan, Inc., released the Hickory Dickory Clock, a crank toy intended for children. This clock used a record, needle, and tone arm to produce its sound.
In 1968, the first truly portable talking clock, the Mattel-a-Time Talking Clock, was released.
In 1984, the Hattori Seiko Co. released the world's first quartz-based talking clock, the Pyramid Talk.
Current talking clocks often include many more features than just giving the time; in these, the ability to speak the time is part of a wide range of voice capabilities, such as reading the weather or other information to the user.
Talking Lips Alarm Clock photo from:
Talking Clock Museum
http://www.talkingclocks.net/detail.aspx?clockid=256
