| ★ HARDWARE ★ DK'TRONICS SPEECH SYNTHESISER ★ |
| Amstrad Speech Synthesiser (CPC Revue) | DK'TRONICS SPEECH SYNTHESISER (Popular Computing Weekly) |
Spoken word I must confess that I've never been one to be greatly seduced by the appeal of computer speech, nor, having been used to the Spectrum's weedy bleeps, did I regard the CPC 464 as a machine that requires external amplification as a high priority. However, there can be no question that speech synthesisers, if they can sell in sufficient numbers to encourage software support, are popular peripherals and it is certainly nice to be able to hear the stereo effect of the sound channels without the rigmorole of plugging in the hi-fi, which always struck me as a retrograde step from the remarkable simplicity of the all-in-one single plug 464. The package consists of two quite neat ‘pod mounted' car speakers which connect to a small box, finished to match exactly with the main computer except for the DK'Tronics logo. This plugs snugly into the floppy disc edge connector and also sends a wire to the stereo sound output socket, together with a built-in extension bus to allow further external peripherals to be plugged in. Fitting should be simple, involving just slotting the thing into the back. However, the first try revealed an unsuspected fault in my computer - if you inspect the floppy disc edge connector you will see that it in fact consists of two halves separated by a slot, presumably to ensure that you don't plug things in upside down. On my machine this slot is self-evidently smaller than it should be and I could not get the speech box to fit without damaging the corresponding ridge on the interface. Having struggled for almost half an hour to sort this out I am now dreading having to remove the interface. In place it acts as a permanent simplifier and stereo output for commercial games etc. It gains all its power from the computer and does not interfere with the inbuilt sound output if you choose to disconnect the speakers. The speech part of the interface can be accessed from Basic or machine code at any time by sending the appropriate allelophone data to the out channel concerned. To help you do this there is a table of words showing their composition in allelophones. You can also control the speed at which the speech is output. Sound quality is appropriately robotic and bland but reasonably clear. However, once the accompanying, relocatable, 5K of software is loaded then the thing comes into its own. You are given eight new Basic commands for controlling the speech output and, as well as allelophones, you can now employ ‘text to speech conversion' wherein you can direct a message that would normally be printed to any channel to be spoken. Within minutes the big kids in our house had the 464 saying all sorts of outrageous things to the accompaniment of much hilarity and I can confirm that this system seemed to work even better than the allelophone method. I trust that there will be no problems from DK'Tronics about software copyright if people choose to include this in their own Basic programs. The speech commands are interrupt driven and there is a built-in buffer that holds some 45 seconds of speech. In all this is a fun package that whilst appearing a bit frivolous in some ways, has been well implemented and has enough good features to make it worth the money. Tony Kendle , Popular Computing Weekly |
|  |
