Machines that can talk and listen have been part of historical tradition since antiquity. Dresden also boasts one of the legendary “speaking heads”, which is said to have been made around 1700 by the versatile vice-rector of the “Kreuzschule”, Johann Valentin Merbitz. However, it was not until the Age of Enlightenment, under the influence of Leonhard Euler, that serious scientific attempts were made to build “speaking machines”. One of these, constructed by Wolfgang von Kempelen and described in 1791, has rightly become famous. Its creator presented it on one of his lecture tours in Dresden in 1784, and today a replica from 2009 enhances the Acoustic-Phonetic Collection of the TUD Dresden University of Technology. It was a long road, then, to the establishment of the field that is referred to today as natural language human-machine interaction or more simply as speech. Its development would not have been possible at all without the accompanying preliminary work in electronics and computer technology. At universities, the field was institutionalized in different ways, with its interdisciplinary nature rooted in very different disciplines, such as phonetics, physiology, perceptual psychology, acoustics, communications engineering, and computer science. In Dresden, speech technology emerged as part of weak current engineering. At present, this field is called information technology and has its own collection: the “elektron” Collection.