If half your work day is spent thinking up ways to troll and annoy your co-workers, today's going to be an easy one. Neil Thapen's Pink Trombone is a browser-based speech synthesiser that lets you manipulate a simulated mouth, throat, tongue, and nasal cavity to create a remarkably realistic -- and equally annoying -- human voice.

Amazon recently announced that the Alexa AI powering its Echo and other hardware has now learned 1,000 "skills" (up from just 135 in January). In case you're not up to speed with all the new tricks, we've picked out 40 of our favourites -- you can discover the other 960 yourself.

The growing popularity of so-called "vocal fry", particularly among young women, is either a hot new trend or the bane of cultured discourse, depending on who you ask. But when it comes to popular music, vocal fry actually enhances expressiveness.

Google's artificial intelligence is getting speedily (and worryingly?) better, as its recent slam-dunk of a human Go champion demonstrated. That victory required highly computationally-efficient AI rather than just brute force, something Google thinks could help it move speech recognition offline.

The first-ever working vocal cords able to produce realistic sound have been grown from scratch in a lab, promising hope to people who have lost their voice due to illness, injury or invasive surgery.

One of the coolest new Windows 10 features is talking to your computer. For many people, it will be the first time they have had a voice-activated personal assistant on tap. And yet, most computers won't have Cortana turned on by default -- allegedly because they don't have certified high-quality microphones built-in.

Google Voice has an incredibly useful function that provides you with a transcribed version of your voicemail -- but if often gets things wrong. Now, Google is throwing neural networks at the problem to help improve its performance dramatically.

Unless you're one of the handful of people rocking a Windows Phone, you won't have much experience with Cortana, Microsoft's personal digital assistant. With the roll-out of Windows 10, Cortana is about to make a lot of new friends very quickly -- and like me, they might soon find themselves shouting instructions at their computer on a regular basis.

Briefly: All of Toshiba's new laptops will let you summon Windows 10's Cortana voice assistant with a dedicated keyboard key. Expect other manufacturers to follow suit. On Xbox One, you'll need a Kinect to use Cortana.

The boffins over at SoundHound just released a video of their Hound voice query app and it’s incredible. Unlike some voice recognition that needs you to speak slowly and clearly, the Hound team want you to be able to just talk normally.

Here's a good deed you can do without parting with a single thing. Synthetic voices for people who have lost the ability to speak only come in generic types -- think of Stephen Hawking's voice -- but one fascinating project wants to build custom voices for each person. To do that they need your help: specifically, a recording of your voice.

Listen to super talented voice actor Brock Baker zip through 33 different Simpsons impressions in 5 minutes. His Homer takes a little getting used to but he nails a good chunk of them. There are a few that are pitch perfect (like his Fat Tony). Anyway, it all adds up to a very fun watch.

There are a lot of cool things you can do with Google Now, but with Google constantly adding more voice commands (and integrating Google Now even more with Android KitKat), it's easy to forget all your options. This graphic shows many of the latest instructions available if you just say "OK Google..." or tap the microphone.

Siri has provided iPhone users around the planet with everything from weather forecasts to restaurant reviews, whilst fending off dumb-arse questions along the way. But if you ever wondered who whispered all those sweet nothings, here's your answer.

If you've ever listened to a recording of yourself and thought you sound completely different, you're not alone. But more than that you were also correct. Here's why it sounds different.

People who have been blind since a young age can sometimes learn to develop a sort of low-grade echolocation. This technique, used by the likes of Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Ronnie Milsap, and Ben Underwood, works much the same way as it does in bats and dolphins. But people who have just recently lost their sight can't harness this ability innately. They need the vOICe to do it for them.

If you're playing your ongoing game of buzzword-bingo, feel free to add this one to your list: perceptual computing. It's a phrase that you're about to hear a lot of, and for good reason: it's the future of computing, and it's freaking awesome.

It's getting dangerous just to walk and text at the same time much less do so behind the wheel of a car. But with Siri being just slightly less helpful than HAL, how are you supposed to surf the web and simultaneously travel safely? All you have to do is ask.

Voice control has been the trend in phones for a while now, but it's not content to just stay there. The newest Chrome Beta 25 is introducing a Web Speech API, which means a talk-y future is on the horizon, hopefully.