Speech SynthesizerSynthesized speech was for a lo... - Blogger

Speech Synthesizer Synthesized speech was for a long time the Holy Grail of computing, and back in the 1980s when a 4MHz CPU made your computer the fastest machine in the neighborhood it just wasn't practical for software to create intelligible speech. In those days the only sensible way to generate speech was to offload the task to dedicated hardware because the CPU simply couldn't keep up. The most widely used speech chip through the 80s and early 90s was the famous SPO256A-AL2, the allophone speech processor. It was used in toys, in external speech synthesizer peripherals for desktop computers, in industrial control systems, and all sorts of other unexpected places. Then as CPU power continued to increase rapidly speech synthesis was moved to being a software function, and nowadays of course it is almost always done entirely in software by the main CPU using only a tiny fraction of the available processing power. As a result the SPO256 chip dropped out of production and became a footnote in the history of technology. Which leaves Arduino developers in a quandary, because in terms of processing power the ATmega chips put us back into the 80s again. An ATmega could possibly produce intelligible speech directly but it would use every available CPU cycle to do it, and the Arduino itself would be pretty much useless at doing anything else at the same time. Not much good if you just want to add voice feedback to an existing project. However, the demise of the SPO256 means you can't just link one up to your Arduino and offload speech generation to it. With old stock of the SPO256 drying up Magnevation decided to do something about it, and designed a new speech chip that works on the same principles as its predecessor but has a much smaller physical package and offers a handy serial interface rather than a clunky parallel interface. The result is the SpeakJet, an 18-pin DIP device that can do everything the old SPO256 did plus more.


Sp0256 Voice Synthesizer Project - Bookshelf

Practical Arduino: Cool Projects for Open Source Hardware

Practical Arduino: Cool Projects for Open Source Hardware

The result is the SpeakJet, an 18-pin DIP device that can do everything the old SPO256 did plus more. In this project we'll assemble a speech synthesizer ...

Controlling the world with your PC

Controlling the world with your PC

The project relies on a General Instruments SPO256 speech synthesizer IC. The English language is made up of 59 distinct sounds, and the SPO256 knows how to ...

Industrial education

Industrial education

There are more sophisticated voice synthesizers available than the one described in this article, however, this will make a good introductory project into ...

Designing with speech processing chips

Designing with speech processing chips

This routine makes the speech synthesizer say numbers from 0 to 9 when you press ... Vocabulary for the SP0256-AL2 Because most of the projects in this book ...

Chip talk, projects in speech synthesis

Chip talk, projects in speech synthesis

These allophonic code strings are specifically matched to the data input signals that are used by the SPO256-AL2 speech synthesizer IC. ...

Day-after-day Report Directory


C.lewis19
The SP0256-AL2 used in this project produces all 59 phonemes of the English ... 18X microcontroller to control a (now obsolete) SP0256 speech synthesizer IC. ...

Magnevation SpeakJet
Completely self contained, single chip voice synthesizer and complex sound synthesizer

SSG01 Sound Coprocessor IC
The Soundgin is an 18-Pin Microchip PIC18F1320 that has been programmed to generate complex sounds by incorporating six oscillators which can interact with each other ...

Speech synthesis
The first articulatory synthesizer regularly used for laboratory experiments was ... latest project is to learn how to better project my voice" contains ...

Old Semiconductors
VOICE SYNTHESIZER IC. Voice Synthesizer IC. SP0256-AL2. Allophone Speech ... You can see a clock project using this chip by clicking here. This particular one is ...