GILLMANN@B.ISI.EDU.UUCP (09/05/86)
I have experience with two speech digitizing cards for the PC, the CompuTalker board and the Dialogic board(s). The CompuTalker board is a fairly old design and I got it some years ago, but it has some nice features. In particular, it has an excellent AGC circuit that deals well with the volume variations in long distance calls vs. local calls. It can playback and record speech at various rates, the lowest being 1200 bytes/second, and 2000 bytes/second for most telephone applications. It can detect and send TouchTones and it has good call progression software. The board works with either the telephone line or a mike/speaker setup. I believe the price is $600. CompuTalker can be reached at 213-828-6546. I have also used the Dialog/40 card from Dialogic. This card can handle up to 4 telephone lines at once, and you can install multiple cards for even more lines. It has a very nice event queueing package that allows you to write software for it in a semi-reasonable way (too bad DOS doesn't do tasking!). It does the usual playback/record and TouchTones, the rate is something like 2500 bytes/second. The PC only gets interrupted once per buffer, rather than once per byte, so it's not overloaded. The board only connects to telephone lines. The Dialog/40 card costs $1000 and their number is 201-334-8450. They also make a single line board. I have also use the Texas Instruments and IBM speech cards. Both of these are more elaborate. They both use the TMS320 chip to do LPC speech and can also do text-to-speech synthesis. Billy has covered them in detail in past digests, so I won't repeat the info here. Dick Gillmann [See Info-IBMPC@B.ISI.EDU for relevant back-issues and such. -Elmo]