On 12/1/20 7:28 PM, Tony Aiuto via cctalk wrote: That's actually... useful. I've never really known what people did with them, beyond the occasional little bit of amusement. I've got a serial-interfaced one based around an RCA 1802 which I last had hooked up to an Apple II a few years ago, but it's one of those "cool to have" things rather than really serving any purpose.

I had an RS-232 Votrax and also the Heathkit EE-3403 Speech Synthesis course for the ET-3400 Microprocessor Trainer, which came with an SC-01 chip as one of the parts if I recall correctly. Both long ago faded away through downsizing here sadly. I do still have the test-to-speech input file from 1988 that was used to have the Votrax sing the 12-days-of-Christmas at the company holiday party that year, and the HP 3000 utility to feed it out a serial port. On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 8:37 AM Tony Aiuto via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

In response to the question about real-world applications of Votrax: My exposure to the Votrax was on a version of it (probably rather early -- 1977 I think) that was a small box connected as an add-on peripheral to the PLATO system terminals. The programming system included an API (set of TUTOR language commands) that effectively provided a text-to-speech service. At the time, text to speech for English was beyond the state of the art, or at least beyond the skill level of the people involved in that project. But they did have useable text to speech for German, Spanish, IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and Esperanto. There also was a way to write English in a more phonetic manner that could then be spoken, called "WES", I don't know what that stands for. I saw a demo of this, it certainly worked. Pretty amusing to hear the computer say "Auf den Autobahnen gibt es keine Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzungen." I don't know if it was applied to any production applications ("lessons"). The software actually still exists, but it hasn't been revived. There is a CDC 6000 emulator that can run it, but the missing part is a Votrax emulation. Or an actual device that could be hooked to a PC, I suppose. paul