Thanks - that's of interest to me as I'll explain below.bwinkel67 wrote:Thank you Dilwyn!
Btw, here is what digitized speech sounds like on a ZX81...maybe someday we can have that on the QL too...
https://youtu.be/UnfJG_H_Dsc
Back in the 1980s, a then colleague of mine at the BBC and I collaborated on very basic speech synthesis for the Welsh language, which was very rare in those days. We worked on BBC micros and Spectrums, as there were no or very few PCs or Macs in common use in the BBC at the time, especially out in the regions. We used a system of (I think it was called) allophones and phonemes to tie together basic sounds of a language. Given how primitive was the equipment we had in those days, and we didn't really know what we were doing, we did achieve quite a lot I suppose.
I had started on the Spectrum by writing machine code routines (called using FN statements from ZX Basic IIRC - the code is in one of my early Spectrum books) to get simple zaps, etc from the Spectrum speaker as opposed to the usual simple BEEPs. So we did what we could to send simple sounds to the beeper, but although it worked fairly well on the BBC micro (that had a better sound system than the Spectrum), we didn't have much success with Spectrum speech until we started sending the output to the cassette save port and listened to it using a cassette recorder in record mode on pause. Using the cassette recorder as an amplifier if I remember correctly. I think we achieved something fairly similar to the sound on your video.
IIRC, one problem we had was that the 8-bit micros at the same didn't have enough memory or mass storage to save the data files used adequately, so we were limited to short phrases at a time. Certainly, BASIC at the time was too slow, we had to use machine code. In a broadcast environment, of course, we could edit these short sentences together on tape to make meaningful speech. It was understandable, but quite low quality.
We then used one of the early Spectrum speech synthesisers which was allophone based and got fairly good results, good enough that one of the radio producers liked it enough to record some output in Welsh and a program was broadcast in Welsh with the Spectrum speech synth speaking Welsh, which was quite a novelty in those days. At some point, the BBC micro got a speech synthesis chip, so we stopped working on that, and the Spectrum work became more of a hobby thing than the original aim of doing enough work to get the local university to take an interest if we developed it far enough. Long term, it achieved nothing because technology moved on quickly, but I got quite a bit of kudos and respect for the work we did on it at the time. I just wish nowadays that we'd kept the work we did - that was 35 years ago, of course, the evidence is probably long since lost.
At one stage, I had a QL sound and speech board called the QSV400, produced by an English company called Maurice Computers. I gave the board away when I lost interest in it, but some of the software I wrote to use that board is still in Quanta software library. I think there was a 3D Tic Tac Toe (3D Oxo for Brits) or 4-in-a-row (I forget which) and a simple program to make it easier to use the device.
Just had a nostalgic day remembering back to those days!