Volume 2: Synthesize it Loud, Synthesize it Proud

This installment of our ongoing series in the history of speech is sure to bring nostalgic remembrances to all you Speech Heads born in the late 70s to early 80s. Just a little more than thirty years ago, Texas Instruments brought us an important development would change many a childhood. No. I’m not talking about the TI-89 calculator with your copy of “Drugwars” surreptitiously installed so you could slack off in the back of pre-calculus. I’m talking about the Speak & Spell.

Speak & Spell

I can see some speech-eyes rolling. “Really, Eric?” you’re asking, but hear me out. Despite it’s humble size, The Speak & Spell played an important role in Speech History. It was one of the first highly accurate and widely available text-to-speech products—really one of the first practical applications of speech synthesis for a consumer market.

The toy was a direct outgrowth of Texas Instrument’s bizarre 1970s experiments in speech synthesis. The world had just seen man create the tech required to reproduce human speech with tuned voices stored on ROMs. Seeing the potential of those speech fruits, Paul Breedlove, a TI engineer, began development of the Speak & Spell in 1976 with a paltry $25,000 budget. Yes, even then it seems that the world callously and stupidly turned a cold shoulder to speech. Breedlove, however, would be vindicated. Within two short years, the Speak & Spell was flying off the 1978 shelves.

Breedlove’s completed proof incorporated TI’s trademarked Solid State Speech technology, which stored full words in solid state the way calculators of those halcyon 1970s days stored numbers. The Speak & Spell even had a slot for “expansion module” cartridges, which could be inserted to beef up the onboard vocabulary. O’ the foresight of those Texas men! You can see the very same principles at work at today’s speech solutions, like with Nuance and their specific expansion vocabularies for radiology, or orthopedics, or (hopefully in the future) trucking—Nuance, if you’re reading this, I know that there’s at least one boy who’d like to see a CB trucker vocabulary for his Dragon Naturally Speaking rig next Christmas.

The Speak & Spell had its limitations though; limitations that in many ways highlighted some of the persistent problems of building vocabularies that have dogged us in speech.

In my own bucolic childhood, my friends and I would use the old S&S to try and spell dirty words we had found in the dictionary. I’m sure some of you Speech Heads out there did the same, only to find, with the same disappointing results my brother Adam B. and I saw, that words like “wiener” and “scuzzbucket” were not included in the machine’s rather limited vocabulary. Come to think of it, you couldn’t even find the latter term in the limited vocabulary of a late 80s dictionary, either.

Still, the Speak & Spell had great staying power. The machine was produced for nearly twenty years and saw many improvements over its 1978-1992 run. Its vacuum florescent display was replaced with liquid crystal, it was given a membrane keyboard (which in turn was changed from ABC to standard QWERTY layout), and it saw several releases in different languages.

The Germans, no kidding, called theirs the “Das Büddy;” the French “La Super Dictée Magique,” the Spanish “El Loro Parlanchín,” and the Italians “Il Grillo Parlante Piu,” which inexplicably translates to “The Speaking Grill Plus.”

Special fun fact about the different languages: there’s no regional lockout on the expansions, so you can plug a German cartridge into your English Speak & Spell and confuse the b’jeepers out of your friends.

More important than its technological significance though, is its impact on our cultural memory. The Speak & Spell, perhaps more than any other speech solution, has made its way into popular discourse. Various works of art make reference to it. Kraftwerk sampled it in their seminal work Computer World, E.T. famously used one to phone home, there’s one in Toy Story, Chucky played with one in Bride of Chucky, and Dane Cook (who isn’t funny at all) apparently has a shtick about it on his album Harmful if Swallowed. And these are just a few. A lot of musicians use modified Speak & Spells with bent circuts as instruments.

All this talk is probably getting you Speech Heads worked up into a heat. You’re probably just itching to visit mom and dad, and spend six hours trying to fish your old Speak & Spell from your childhood closet. You don’t have to, though. There are a bunch of emulators on the Internet for you to play with without having to suffer one of your father’s fishing stories or your mother’s constant criticism about your hygiene.

Just click here for a taste!

Also, click here to see the insides of the machine!

Anyhow, that’s all for this installment. So, to Texas Instrument’s Speak & Spell, Speech Tech Blog salutes you!