| US BBC Model B Speech | |
| US BBC Model B Speech | |
Well, it worked and sounded OK - although I can't bring you audio footage of it at the moment, as I explained at the start!
The speech interface is in fact extremely versatile. The Phrase ROM is provided really for convenience, to produce a variety of handy words easily by punching in a number using the SOUND command. The speech processor itself can be programmed to make "glottal air impulses" in a digital representation of the human vocal tract, so that any word or voice-sound can be heard. However, it is highly complex to achieve: each speech sound has to be broken into a number of frames, each with an energy and pitch parameter and up to ten reflection co-efficients. Added to that, the data to be programmed into the speech processor has to be sent as a stream of bytes, with the bits of each byte sent in reverse order.
Needless to say, I won't be getting to grips with any of that in the foreseeable future!