scottm@cavell.UUCP (Scott McPhee) (12/03/84)
>I would not think that the SID chip has sufficient filtering capability >to synthesize recognizable speech. >There is, however, a speech synthesis board available (at Toys 'R' Us >among other places) which I have not actually heard myself > Larry Russell Have you heard S.A.M. for the C64 ?? It has to be one of THE BEST speech synthesizers on the market for micro computers, period. It costs about $70 and comes with a fantastic text to speech parser that wedges into BASIC so you can merely change a PRINT statement to a SAY statement and the application will pronounce the string instead of printing it to the screen. It has advanced features to prounce '#' as 'number', '<' as 'less than', etc. You can also change the pitch of SAM's voice with a ]PI=x, where 0 <= x <= 255, statement to make him call your dog ultrasonically or shake your knees with with a thunderous boom (when hooked up to your stereo properly through the audio out). You can also change the speed that SAM speaks at with ]SP=x, same range of x, so he can say "Peter picked a peck of pickled peppers" faster than you can say "P..." right down to a brain damaged slowness. SAM speaks with automatic inflection and it is really quite easy to make him sing the American national anthem (which is provided on disk). So before you give the vacant opinion that cuts the SID chip short... make sure you have something to base it on. The filtering of the SID is competitive to what is available on dedicated sound synthesizers that bands pay big bucks for. By the way, I went to a local music store here in Edmonton, Alberta, and they had rows of amps, guitars, and sound machines, but they had a C64 up front in the spotlight!