Votrax Type'N Talk as a speaking aid

Описание: A newer version of this video with the intro slides narrated by a 2022 speech synthesizer is available here:
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The pursuit of a speaking aid
This slide show/video is a summary of of a personal project I completed in 1980/81 while I was working with Z80 microprocessors at Control Data's Magnetic Peripherals division in Bloomington, MN. When I recently dug the system out of the box it has been stored in for almost 40 years, I was amazed to find that it still worked
Electronic speech synthesis was still in it's infancy at the time and the Votrax Type'N Talk was the best solution I could find that allowed for an unlimited vocabulary. Texas Instruments was also working on some electronic speech synthesis products (ie: the Speak N Spell product) but their systems all had limited vocabularies.
With the Votrax Type'N Talk system you had to learn to spell your words in a more phonetic fashion. The word "mouse" is a good example. If spelled "mause" instead of "mouse", the word would sound more natural.
The Z80 computer inside the keyboard had a number of pre-programed phrases assigned to specific keys as well as the ability to save or assign a user defined phrase to other keys.
Although the system did not generate perfectly fluent speech, it was at least better than the alternatives of the time.