I remember when I was a kid my brother got a Transformers voice changer. It looked like a short, squat Optimus Prime, and when you pushed a button on the side, a little rubbery tube flipped up from the back and it played a flat tone. When you put the tube in your mouth and talked silently, you’d get a robot voice — although you had to be careful not to shove the tube too far back in your throat, and some consonants like Bs and Ps were hard to reproduce.
A few years ago, when I was setting up my Art-o-matic (an art “vending machine” with me inside) I found a voice changer gadget. It had a microphone and a speaker, and a couple of settings for a robot voice, a low voice (think Darth Vader) and just amplification. It did the trick, though you did have to speak audibly enough for the microphone to pick up your voice.
Ridiculo.us, the team that brought you the Run Free Race (as well as a campaign to end infant beardlessness), just launched a new Kickstarter project for the WeeWow, a little device that turns your iPhone into a talkbox. More like that old Transformers toy than my voice changer gizmo, the WeeWow slips onto the bottom of your phone (where the speaker is) and routes the sound through a tube to your mouth, where you can shape the sound into words and weird robot noises. What’s more, since it can use any sound coming from your iPhone, you can pretty much use any app that creates tones, giving you countless possibilities for the types of voices you can make.
Check out the WeeWow Kickstarter page for more — the best way to understand what the WeeWow does is to watch the video. Of course, you could always get one of these Transformers voice-changing helmets instead, but I don’t know if they fit adults.
