Single-chip speech synthesizer debuts in TI Speak & Spell™ learning aid

An outgrowth of TI's research in the area of synthetic speech, the Speak & Spell™ educational product was designed to help children age seven and older learn how to spell and pronounce more than 200 commonly misspelled words.

It began in 1976 as a three-month feasibility study with a $25,000 budget. Four TIers worked on the project in its early stages: Paul Breedlove, Richard Wiggins, Larry Brantingham, and Gene Frantz. The concept for Speak & Spell grew out of Breedlove's brainstorming for products that might demonstrate the capabilities of bubble memory (a TI research project). He concluded that speech data took a lot of memory and would be a good application.

The talking learning aid used an entirely new concept in speech recognition. Unlike tape recorders and pull-string photograph records used in many “speaking” toys at the time, TI's Solid State Speech circuitry had no moving parts. When it was told to say something it drew a word from memory, processed it through an integrated circuit model of a human vocal tract and then spoke electronically.

It marked the first time the human vocal tract had been electronically duplicated on a single chip of silicon.

The consumer product was introduced at the Summer Consumer Electronics Shows in June 1978.

The success of Speak & Spell extended TI's thrust in educational products to Speak & Math™, Speak & Read™, Speak & Music™, and a whole collection of speaking children's toys. Speak & Spell went around the world – in several languages.

Although it was introduced more than 25 years ago, the basic learning principles and design concepts behind Speak & Spell remain the standard for educational toys. Speech synthesis and voice recognition applications are pervasive today – ranging from telephone applications for checking airline schedules, to voice-assisted navigation systems in automobiles, computers for the blind, and security applications.