FUQ (eff -yu - cue) - FAQ's with an EDGE

Tagged As: Voice Synthesizer

Question:
Does anyone know of a simple voice synthesizer chip? I am aware of the Ditalker chip set, but it is two large for my application. I could live with a chip that could synthesize just numbers and the alphabet. It would be nice to be able to synthesize a few short words. Thank you for your help in advance.

Answer:
Just digitize the phoneme/allophones on an Amiga or just an A2D to your clone, and then edit it by trail and error and burn the separate phonemes/ allophones into EPROM's at separate addresses and use a small controller or a simple state machine made from an EPROM to run the addressing of the lookup tables to start sampling them to a plain 8 bit D2A!!! Use your own voice!! You could use the same 6 bit codes to ID them, and the other 2 bits for 4 tonalities by changing the clock on them to four values! Here is a tutorial on the phonemes and the original Votrax chip, which are no longer made. Maybe you can figure it out. It's just like doing a mod file, even easier!!! And it's not hard to get ahold of that one document to use an algorithm to speak english using phonics rules and a table of exceptions!!! Have the processor look at the whole word first and the cruncher decide how to say it!!! Speech is slow. Wayne, take a look at the Continuous Variable Slope Delta (CVSD) Modulator/Demodulator chips. Motorola makes the MC3417/18 and MC34115 This type of circuit was used years ago in electronic games as a very cheap sound generation device. The same chip can encode speech into a data stream and decode a data stream into speech. Very simple technology.