[Coco] [Color Computer] Voice Simulator

[Joel Ewy]

Bev D. Keddy wrote:
> I remember seeing an ad in Hot CoCo many years ago that featured a voice
> simulator, sort of an artificial intelligence program.  I am wondering
> if anyone here remembers that ad, and that product, and whether anyone
> here actually had or has it.  I'm curious to know how well this worked,
> twenty years ago.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Bev
>
>   
In addition to the Tandy Speech and Sound cart that Gene Heskett
mentioned, there was the Real Talker, from Colorware.  I found an ad for
it on the first page of the May 1984 Hot CoCo.  It used a Votrax SC-01
speech synthesizer chip.  Real Talker was a cartridge that plugged into
the expansion slot, multi-pak, or Y-cable.  It came with a
text-to-speech program. 

I'm almost certain there were other hardware speech synthesizers
available for the CoCo, but don't have time this evening to poke through
all my old CoCo mags to refresh my memory.  This may be the one you were
thinking of being advertised in Hot CoCo.  In addition to speech
synthesizers, there was a voice recognition system called E.A.R.S.

Allen Huffman's CoCo Wiki mentions "Super Voice" and "Super Talker"
speech synthesizers, but neither have articles yet:  [
http://www.coco25.com/wiki/index.php/Hardware ]  Anyone who has one of
these should really write up an article.  I did a piece there on the
DS-69 Digisector video digitizer.

JCE