RE VIE W
TALK IS CHEAP!
Low Cost Speech for
Arduino, PICAXE, and
BASIC Stamp Projects
by Eric Ostendorff
www.servomagazine.com/index.php?/magazine/article/november2012_Ostendorff
Discuss this article in the SERVO Magazine forums at http://forum.servomagazine.com
When Star Wars came out in 1977,
the world loved R2-D2 even though
he couldn't talk. He expressed himself
with an amazing variety of chirps,
beeps, and clicks. No doubt inspired
to help computers and robots talk,
American technology rose to the
occasion. By the early 1980s, the
speech synthesis market was
booming. Hobbyists could buy
General Instruments' SP0-256 speech
synthesizer and companion TTS chip
at RadioShack. The "Shack" and
Heathkit used Votrax SC-01 based
synthesizers for their TRS- 80
computers and HERO robots,
respectively. Even Target carried the "Voice Messenger" which gave the Commodore 64
decent text to speech (TTS) capability. Texas Instruments had speaking products for
computers and toys. Who doesn't remember the Speak & Spell toys?
Surprisingly, stand-alone TTS chips nearly died off in subsequent years. The surplus of Votrax and General Instruments chips supported a trickle of hobbyist interest, but they got increasingly difficult to find this millennium. Ken Lemieux of speechchips.com was one of several suppliers of discontinued chips and hard-to-find parts — including the SP0-256. More recently, Ken carried the Speakjet, Soundgin, and Babblebot speech chips. Brand new as of July 2012 is the SP0-512, a.k.a., RoboVoice. Inspired by his longtime association with the SP0-256, RoboVoice
is Ken's own creation using modern technology. He spent several months coding in ANSI C and created a one-chip
synthesizer using 800+ TTS rules.
44 SERVO 11.2012
