1980's speech synthesis chips (Lots of videos) - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 14, 2013, 03:31:01 am
content: I remember in the early 80s seeing speech chips for sale at Radio Shack so I decided to look them up and see what they were, and if they could be inexpensively acquired and driven by an Arduino.Well there appears to have been a few ones used in the 80s to give speech to random things and there's youtube videos of what they sounded like.General Instrument:GI SP0256-AL2 (Radio Shack Chip) Allophone basedGI SP0256-012 (Mattel Intellivoice Chip) "Mattel Electronics Presents!" and numbersGI SP0256-17 Just can say numbers without an external chip to supply it with more phrases.Votrax:SC-01-ASC-02 (I like the way this one sounds)Texas Instruments:TMC0281 (Speak and Spell!)This one has been hacked with an 18+ rated vocabularyAlso if you have an Android phone you can download the Speak and Spell simulator from the Play Store which is really fun.I'll add more chips as I can find them. Now I want to find one of these chips cheap and build something!

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 14, 2013, 06:05:46 am
content: I still have those Tandy SPO chips, + a voice recognition chip.Cool stuff.Dave.

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 14, 2013, 06:17:45 am
content: TheTI TSP50C04was used in the infamous Furby.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 14, 2013, 07:15:59 am
content: there was a 40 pin companion chip for the spo256 that was also sold by tandy. was a general instruments predecessor for the PIC16 ... mask programmed. the thing basically had a uart and could do text to speech. send in ascii text and it woudl talk. so no mucking about with the phonemes.-edit-- found it : CTS256A-AL2. based on a United States Naval Research Laboratory text-to-phoneme algorithm codeveloped with Votrax

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 14, 2013, 05:40:57 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on January 14, 2013, 07:15:59 amYes while searching for into I found a chip pair that they used to sell.

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 14, 2013, 05:44:55 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on January 14, 2013, 06:05:46 amSo does it say "sall-der" or "sodder" for "solder" ? "Aych" or "Haych" for "H" ?

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 14, 2013, 07:57:46 pm
content: I have a listen and learn? TI somewhere, might still work. I do remember it does farm animal sounds.

author: RCMR
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 14, 2013, 09:37:43 pm
content: I went looking for a decent speech synth chip about a year ago and could find nothing that was much good (for a reasonable price).After playing with some SpeekJet chips I tossed them in the bin -- absolutely awful.Finally ended up using an MP3 codec chip and recorded all the phrases/words I needed.The funny thing is that I had a Bondwell laptop back in the 1980s that had a brilliant speech synth built into it -- but these days -- nothing (unless you want to spend hundreds).

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 15, 2013, 01:56:09 am
content: I heard some speakjet samples and they were unintelligible.

author: Skimask
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 15, 2013, 03:58:57 am
content: I've got a speech synthesis cartridge for a Tandy CoCo II laying around here somewhere.Maybe it's time to pull that out, "Take it Apart", and find out what's inside...

author: marmad
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 15, 2013, 05:00:19 am
content: I built my first completely solid-state artwork around the Votrax SC-01 in 1981. The most fun I had with the phonemes starts around 2:25 in the video.I built this artwork in 1986 using one of the TI LPC chip sets - although I don't remember the part number - and I'm travelling, so not near the schematic:

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 15, 2013, 06:21:39 am
content: Quote from: Skimask on January 15, 2013, 03:58:57 amYes, please do. I spent a lot of time googling for what the inside of one looked like yesterday. I still have my COCO II in storage, but never got the speech cartridge.I'm guessing a GI SP0256-AL2 chip but just because that's what radio shack was selling at the time.

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 15, 2013, 06:28:45 am
content: The second one does sound a lot like the speak and spell.

author: Skimask
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 15, 2013, 06:50:53 am
content: That's what I'm thinking too...and it seems like I remember the documentation mentioning that as well.Ya know, if the old CoCo had a cheap reliable method of saving/loading programs, other than the cheap cassette recorder which only worked what-maybe 1/2 the time? Or those expensive hard drives, I'd probably still be using it today. Not for anything important of course...twiddling bits, maybe a bit of light monitoring work or something of that nature.Now I'm thinking how I could adapt something to mimic a cassette recorder... Great another thing that'll be on my mind all night.

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 15, 2013, 07:32:28 am
content: Some of the CoCo emulators dump csaves to .wav files. I think I actually used a wav to load a program on my CoCo, and loaded a tape into the emulator the same way.So you should be able to connect the port on the CoCo to the Mic in on a regular PC or Mac and capture the files.I had the FD502 floppy on my CoCo2 and upgraded it to dual using a PC based drive I got at a garage sale. I also adapted it to save to 720k 3.5 inch disks but still only at the 160K capacity that it supported.

author: Skimask
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 15, 2013, 08:31:49 am
content: That's what I was thinking, except dump the waves into a higher bit mp3...to save on disk space of courseWould a guy earn cool points for that?

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 15, 2013, 07:24:56 pm
content: You do not need a high bit rate, 11kHz mono at 64k will work well, as after all you are just concerned with the zero crossings, nothing else.

author: Skimask
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 15, 2013, 07:44:32 pm
content: True. Even Steve Gibson's "Security Now" podcast sounds pretty good at 16kbps.

author: arj3090
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: December 09, 2014, 02:01:27 am
content: Wow! This really brings back some memories! When I was a senior in high school (1987) I had an IBM PCjr and always toyed with electronics. Radio Shack was one of my favorite places to go to. I bought one of those speech synthesizer chips, etched a circuit board to make an interface to my PCjr parallel port. I then wrote a piece of software that would convert typed words to the allophones to send to the synthesizer chip.

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 09, 2014, 03:50:05 am
content: Let's not forget the awesome Amiga say command