I would like to hear some opinions from other people that have already done
the same thing I plan to do....

Basically I want to make a very cheap voice playback device capable of
playing back a fixed set number of short pre-recorded voice messages.  I
know you get special IC's and CODECS that does exactly this, but they are
still slightly too expensive for what I had in mind.   EPROM IC's are very
inexpensive these days, and I thought that maybe if store my messages as raw
digitized speech on a large EPROM and play it back through a resistor ladder
network A/D and filter, I would be able to regenerate speech messages at a
relatively low cost.  If I then use a PIC to address the EPROM and add a
serial interface to it, this could become a very cheap speech messaging
system that is addressable via the serial bus from my target
microcontroller.

Now, my questions are this:

1.  Is it a feasible way of doing this?
2. What sampling rate would I need?  (I was thinking 8KHz @ 8 bits
resolution) Is this good enough?
3. Has anybody perhaps done something like this already? Was the sound
reasonably clear?

One final question....  Some time ago, someone on the Piclist mentioned a
stand-alone text-to-speech synthesizer available for as low a cost as
$49.95.   I can not remember the details anymore.  Do anybody where I can
buy one of these?  I made a search on the web, but all I could come up with
is a device from RC systems  http://members.aol.com/rcsys  which costs about
$150, and is thus a bit too expensive for what I had in mind.  Have anybody
reading this ever used these text-to-speech modules and do they work well?

Rgds
Werner
--
Werner Terreblanche  <wterreb@plessey.co.za>Tel :  (021) 7102251 (office
hours)