Hello Nick,
>
> Hi Tom ...
> Your experience with the General Instrument speech processor chips
> would probably interest quite a few subscribers to this list.  It is
> still played with by many roboticists because it sounds like a "real"
> robot.

Actually with the wonderfully "tinkering" manner of my fellow Piclisters,
they would be interested that the chip actually has some other entry points
that produce interesting results. Having said that, I have probably lost all
documentation on those features long ago, but I believe they contained some
entry points that changed amplitude and produced some sounds. I know the
Magnovox Video Game version also had the ability to play some music with
filter sections for some intruments but that was not carried over into the
commercial version.

>
> The SPO256A Narrator Speech Processor and its companion, the
> CTS256A-AL2
> Code-To-Speech Processing Chip were marketed for awhile by Radio
> Shack.

Yup, we ported the code from the 8031-based Video Game to a 17 series of 8
bitter that was made jointly by TI and GI (No relation to the present 17
series).

If one wants some serious speech work, the GI SP2000 was a single chip
speech processor that would not only do synthesis, but could be turned
around and used effectively as a speech recognition device. A while ago tens
of thousands of them were available as surplus for pennies.

Tom