Basic Trope: Robot speech sounds nothing like human speech.
- Straight: Robby the robot always speaks in monotone.
- Exaggerated: Every robot in the work speaks differently, and none of them sound like humans.
- Downplayed: Robby occasionally lapses into monotone, or drops a strange pause or Stock Phrase stereotypically common to robots, but otherwise speaks just like a human.
- Justified:
- Machines have no emotions, and thus no inflections.
- Most artificial voices, even the very human-like ones, still struggle to capture human voice pitch fluctations even in the modern day.
- Inverted:
- The guy cast as Robby is a great actor who Took the Bad Film Seriously. All the actors playing real humans can't do better than Dull Surprise.
- Robby the Robot has an overly emotional, pitch-fluncuating voice. Sometimes it even sounds like he's singing.
- Subverted: Robby's speech sounds like human speech.
- Double Subverted:
- ... In Alice's dream.
- Robby can actually produce speech that passes for human very well, but he deliberately makes his voice sound more robotic.
- Parodied:
- Robots speak so inhumanly it's a Brown Note.
- Animal sounds are dubbed over to simulate Robby's speech, but the human characters in the show still understand him perfectly.
- Zig Zagged: The robot creations by several different scientists are featured in the series - Robby's creator is far less experienced than ALI-C3's, so the latter sounds more human than the former. But let's not get started on the creator of Charl-1E...
- Averted: Robot speech sounds like human speech.
- Enforced: "We can't have the audience forget that Robby's a robot."
- Lampshaded: "Do all robots sound so ... monotonous?"
- Invoked: Robby is practically a clone of his creator, Robert. Robert decides to make it easier to tell who is who by making Robby's voice very robotic.
- Exploited: Robby is tasked to perform a crime because he would not sound nervous when questioned about his whereabouts by the police.
- Defied: "Just because Robby has an A.I. doesn't mean he has to have an artificial voice! I won't consider him finished until he sounds like one of us."
- Discussed: "I wish I could tell if Robby was sarcastic or not sometimes."
- Conversed: "Why do robots in movies always speak in monotone?"
- Implied: In a written work or comic fond of Painting the Medium, humans and robots use slightly different fonts in their dialogue. There is also not a single exclamation mark to be found in Robby's dialogue.
- Deconstructed:
- Even if Robby is a Ridiculously Human Robot, his voice leads to him being ostracised by most of the populace.
- Robby's voice has no pitch inflections, which is a huge problem if he's trying to speak a tonal language such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, ect. Humans who speak these languages struggle to understand Robby because of his lack of pitch, and pitch is important for distinguishing words in such languages.
- Reconstructed: ... But he takes up sign language and earns deaf friends. And/or friends who find his voice uncanny, but cool.
- Played For Laughs: Robby's speech problems is the cause of many a Mondegreen Gags.
- Played For Drama: Robby's speech leads to Poor Communication Kills.
- Plotted A Good Waste: The trope is used to show that Robby is only a work in progress. The series chronicles his creator's attempts to make the first fully functional android in the world, and being able to hold a conversation at all is more important than being able to do so in a humanlike voice.
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