Embedded Text-To-Speech chip?

There was a cheap set of chips (CT-0256?) that would do English TTS in the eighties. One of the chips was a microcontroller that did the text to phoneme (voice sounds) conversion, so doing other languages would have been possible. I don't know if they ever did, but I vaguely think they might have done French.

Of course (a) that was a long time ago and I doubt anyone makes them any more, (b) the voice quality isn't that great, unless you want a really robotic voice. (I have an old ISA card with them, and like it, but I'm weird. I'd get the exact chip numbers, but it's in a box in the basement right now. I'll check if you want.)

That part number might lead you to pages that lead you to more recent chips.

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Ron Sharp.

Helps if it's the right part number. I was thinking of the SPO256-AL2 and CTS256A-AL2.

Huh, sponsored link in Google:

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Ron Sharp.

Thanks a lot! /Roland

The Winbond WS701 chip has fairly decent quality, and capability of storing exceptions, ie a dictionary of common hard to pronounce words. It's phoneme base is English. It is possiblye to produce other languages, but you would certainly struggle trying to produce any Asian languages, for example, because the basic phonemes are different. therefore your results will degrade the further the languages phonetics diverge from english.

Al

Has anyone here played with the (now) sensory inc. SC691 slave synthesyzer ?? How is it ? The other SC6XX parts need to be mask programmed I guess so lots have to be purchased in order for those to be useful. thanks,

bob

Call them and ask for an eval kit. They might even lend it to you for no charge.

I haven't used these chips myself, but I was a somewhat familiar with the family while TI made them. Their main claim to fame, aside from low cost in high volumes, was their support for CELP and MELP. Compressing speech into these formats takes a lot of horsepower, so good tools are essential. Sensory has apparently renamed these CX and MX, and I don't know what compression tools they or third parties offer.

If you, like the OP, want TTS, then AFAIK these chips won't do it. From Sensory's redundantly-titled "Technical Questions FAQ":

Q. Can any of the Sensory chips perform text-to-speech functions? A. Not at this time.

Jim McGinnis

Oops, I just noticed the date of the FAQ is 2/18/00, so it wouldn't apply to the SC-6XX chips. Even so, I don't think these chips would be a good choice to do the whole TTS job, although they'd be usable for the final phoneme synthesis.

Jim McGinnis

OK then... Yeah, it seems like a lot of work. It would be nice if somebody made one or 2 or a few of the mask ROM versions with a decent vocabulary, like numbers and letters and some useful words and the phonemes necessary to do a technical product at least. You know, with the words Voltage and temperature and degrees and amps and that kind of stuff as well as numbers and letters. I really like the way that the Winbond part works, but that might be too expensive for a lot of products (like ours)

bob

Hello, we produce small board TTS, English & Russian, allophones:

. There is feasible to sale TTS as 'file.obj' for your processor with allophones' base. For small number of phrases maybe use ISD chips.

Cheers

support.

ago.

amplified

winbond do have a chinese version as well.

datsheets

Alex

According to Winbond this is still not available.

Al

Alex Gibs>

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