Werner Terreblanche wrote:
>
> 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)
Werner: hard to beat the I.S.D.(information storage devices) chips ie-
[isd 2560]= 60 second message recorder; addressable/standalone/multi
cue-play features approx $20.00 (NZ) has mic & 16ohm spkr inp/drv on
chip already, 28 pin. uses multi level programing of internal eeprom for
hi-density. should save a lot of real estate.
regards Graham Daniel.