How Speech Synthesis Made this '80s Toy Affordable

Let's take a look at the Talking Computron, an educational "pre-computer" toy sold by Sears in the 1980s. This is interesting for a few different reasons, but the use of speech synthesis as a cost-saving measure is particularly intriguing.

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Sorry for the hiatus! As you can probably tell, my studio has changed. That's because I moved and had to set up a new studio. Going forward, I'll be posting frequently again! :)

[smartyhall]

The Sears Wishbook for 1988 lists it on special for $37.99 or $42.99 after December 15th of that year. Additional cartridges were $12.99, and the optional AC adapter was $9.99.

[JonnyTsunami]

I had one of these and it was my favorite toy. I credit it to me being able to read, spell, and do arithmetic at such an early age.

[cyberkreig]

My grandmother bought one of these for me for, I think, Christmas '88. We absolutely had trouble understanding some of the words, got bored with it quickly, and never saw any expansion use.

[DestructiveBurn]

Holly crap I forgot that thing existed. I had one when I was a kid.

[Wythaneye]

Hearing "One Hendred" takes me back. My grandparents had one of these, I loved playing with it.

[agranero]

Synthesized speech at that time is much more complicated than using PCM or delta modulation used in digital audio existing at that time, the advantage is that it did not need much storage: it imitates the naso-laringeal tract by electronic means, the square (in fact pulse wave) generator you mention is the vocal chords, the tongue are are series of 3 digital filters with variable frequency that simulate the ever changing tongue movements as a resonator (because the voice is composed by those "formant" frequencies as how they are called), the occlusive sounds were made by modulating amplitude, fricative and nasal sounds are created with the help of a pseudo random noise generator. You just need to store the how and not the voice sounds but it is not just one byte, you still need to store the frequencies, varying with time, the noise envelope, the pulse envelope, all that was kept inside the chip, it is still much less than storing the digital sound, you have the illusion using the chip because all you need is to send the phonemes required and the chip does all the magic. But it was a real piece of sophisticated engineering in terms of theory and development. It was only made viable because all that could be integrated on a chip and not even a very complicated one. But the details were incredibly complex to do in a way that the voice didn't sound like the first talking computer singing "Daisy, Daisy give me your answer do...". Your explanation despite of capturing the very general idea is misleading.
The voice synthesizer Steven Hawking used is from that time, that is why his voice sounded so dated, he attempted to use a and a more natural modern one by Intel that has a very real voice but quickly changed his mind as that robotic sounding voice from the 80s felt like his real voice because at that time he was using it for decades.

[BaqTalk]

Whoah flashbacks, we didn't have this but did have the Speak & Spell, and later The talking Whiz Kid.
Totally had technology connection vibes with your format. Great work.

[acerbt]

You might think this is speech synthesis, but it's not. The lpc (linear predictive code) format, which this uses, is a way of storing audio, usually speech clips, in a very compressed way. All it's storing is a set of frames that each defined what frequency a saw wave or set of saw waves should be at for a given point in time. In this case it is not truly speech synthesis since it is still playing back recordings and can't say anything outside what was recorded. The echo 2 speech synth for the apple 2 used LPC, but in that case the recordings were just the phonemes that make up speech, which makes that able to be classified as a proper speech synthesizer.

[wisteela]

I love the name Computron. I was think it could be a rebranded Grandstand, and seeing the other model confirmed it. We had various Grandstand ones here in the UK. They were all white and green.

[MattMcIrvin]

The Speak & Spell was very popular and arguably less capable, but the Speak & Spell also had really attractive industrial design for a kid--that carrying handle invited you to take it everywhere.
(The Speak & Spell also came out several years earlier--it was a mind-blowing device out of science fiction for 1978, maybe less so by the mid-1980s. The model in the ads you show here is a later one with a membrane keyboard--I always loved the little round buttons the first model had.)

[outaspaceman]

I’ve two, “Grandstand” branded Talking Computers from “back-then”
I bought them to circuit-bend, but decided this stuff’s getting a bit hard to get now so decided to be their guardian instead..
I enjoy getting it to randomly recite its vocab as it sometimes sounds like poetry..?

[jonathanheim]

I forgot I had one these until I saw you using it! I had one in the 90s because my mom picked one up at a yard sale lol

[serenasamborski]

They were selling one of these at the corner store when i was 8 or 9 and I begged my mom for it since it was the only “computer” we could remotely afford. I loved my little “computer” though I was disappointed I couldn’t do more with it.

[montana_patriot]

My favorite toy as a kid. I remembered when the batteries were about to die, the speech thing would say things that sounded like swear words, and mom took it away. Also, I remember it pronouncing the word oven as "Oh-Ven".

[ionamoebam]

I had one of those to got it on my birthday i think i was 7 i would spend hour's playing with it when i could not play Nintendo because we only had one Tv and video game time was rationed .

[akashashen]

Not a hundo, but I think this might have been my first (toy) computer. Amazing back and fourth in my head as I keep wondering if this was it. I think I've misremembered it being more sophisticated, which is making me think it was. We were at my Aunt's and Uncle's for that Christmas...my cousin was so the jealous, and, as kids are, I was jealous of whatever he was playing with, and neither one of us wanted to share at the same time...kids.

[outaspaceman]

Oh, I should also add..
I’m on a mission to find a way of using the cart slot on a TI Speak & Spell to add new vocab..
Arduino and Raspberry Pi are on standby to assist..

[chouseification]

your guess of $30 seems WAY too low to me... even back then, most toys with a computer chip in them were $50+ if not far more. I used my Speak & Spell all the time, and the only reason I didn't have Speak & Math was due to it being rather expensive.

[jimsteele]

Most of the 8-bit computer magazines ran articles on interfacing a speech synthesiser chip. I built one for my Atari 800 computer back in the Elder Days. You could buy the speech chip, at Radio Shack for maybe 10-15 bucks.

[lemissa]

So i had this when I was a kid in the 90s, so we had an actual full on computer by then, but i LOVED this thing. I can't speak for everyone but I never got sick of it, I cant believe how much i played with it. I absolutely wore one out and my dad had to track down a replacement, which i cant imagine was super easy in 1995. I've never seen the cartridges before though so it was neat to see what they actually looked like! Also I believe your mystery word was "begin"