“The Marvelous Talking-Machine”
The “Euphonia,” an 1845 invention by Joseph Faber, used foot pedals and a keyboard to produce a “weird, ghostly monotone” of a voice (in any European language) through a suspended mannequin-like head. If this suspended mannequin-like head could talk… (More here, though be warned that Faber’s post-Euphonia trajectory was rather bleak.)