Early speech board maker?

Here's an excerpt of a posting that triggered my IMSAI smart agent. Does anyone recognize his name, or the company he's describing? - John Jefferson Computer Museum <http://www.threedee.com/jcm> Subject: Re: WRQ's @Guard From: Wirt Atmar &lt;WirtAtmar(a)AOL.COM&gt; Date: Sat, 20 Jun 1998 15:07:56 EDT Message-ID: &lt;3dda660e.358c088e(a)aol.com&gt; Mailing List: HP3000-L(a)utcvm.utc.edu .... Just because something is possible doesn't mean that anybody's gonna want it. The very first business that AICS was involved in was computer-based speech synthesis. Indeed, that's where our name comes from (AICS = artificially intelligent cybernetic systems). The company grew out of something that had previously been just a hobby of mine -- and a potential dissertation project for graduate school: completely host-based speed synthesis, de novo, where an electrical analog of the human vocal tract was commanded to truly synthesize new speech rather than simply play back digitized human speech. In 1976, when I finished school and the company was formed, we actually made a lot of money surprisingly easily and surprising quickly selling speech synthesizers as drop-in boards for Altair and IMSAI microcomputers. That was a time you could sell anybody anything. Every conference was a feeding frenzy of buying. You threw something up in the air and ten people wanted it. In 1976 also, when I became a professor at our local university, several students also continued on with the speech synthesis work. Vickie Kurtz, a person who you actually sort of know because she is more or less single- handedly putting together QCTerm now, did her master's work with me then. For her thesis, Vickie put together the best vowel synthesizer that I ever heard, using voltage-controlled oscillators, controlled by a simple rom-based finite state automaton so as to simulate the mechanical inertias found in the vocal tract. Although her synthesizer didn't have any sort of noise generator in it, so it couldn't form the fricatives (hiss-like sounds) necessary for full speech synthesis, its vowels were the most human-like I've ever heard and were essentially indistinguishable from a baby's babbling or cat-like animal. Vickie finished in 1982. A year or two earlier, Texas Instruments got into speech synthesis in a big way using a technique halfway between digitized speech and speech synthesis, a process that might now be called "smoothed sampling". It worked much better than true synthesis in that its intelligiblity was quite good. Because of that, TI was able to sell a variety of manufacturers on the idea of having talking washing machines, microwave ovens, vaccuum cleaners, etc. The most expensive of these talking machines was the Chrysler LeBaron automobile -- and people (the end-users, not the engineers) found all of this incredibly irritating. The single most requested option on the LeBaron, by far and away, was to have the speech generator deleted. Talking appliances were a technological fad that lasted only about three years, 1979-1982. ... Wirt Atmar