[microtherion]

MacinTalk 3 (what you probably think of when you say early 90s Mac), i.e. voices like Fred, is technology closely related to DECTalk, and in fact the audio sample in the article sounds eerily close to a Fred-turned-orthodox.

But the article's description of how Siri synthesizes speech is grossly inaccurate.

[temporal828]

Well, sure it's related (and MacinTalk is still builtin to modern macOS and iOS - you can use them for the system TTS voice). But DECTalk and MacinTalk weren't the only speech synthesizers available in 1999 by a long shot.

I had to chuckle about the genius of being able to program C and Lua as if typing English - I mean that's pretty much any reasonably proficient dev.