found it: first speech synthesizer (at least, for S-100 systems)

[Christian Kennedy]

On 12/16/20 12:35 PM, Bob Smith via cctech wrote:

> We had a Votrax in our lab at DEC around that time, we set it up with
> a photo detector to trigger a phrase when someone walked by. IIRC
> programing the sounds used a phoneme library... that was fun figuring
> out before we finally got the manual!!

Yep; it was all phoneme based, which made puzzling out how to use it
interesting.  Ours had an effective upper limit of speed at which you
could pipe serial data at it before it suffered a buffer overrun; you
could tell when that happened because it would, for want of a better
term, start to wail (it would occasionally do that on reset as well).

Interesting piece of kit; IIRC it arrived as an encapsulated brick with
wires hanging out...

-- 
Christian Kennedy, Ph.D.
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