Newsgroups: comp.speech
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From: george@beta.ee.ufl.edu (George L)
Subject: Re: Looking for speech synthesis chips
Message-ID: <1992Nov22.070355.7906@eng.ufl.edu>
Keywords: speech, synthesis
Sender: george@alpha.ee.ufl.edu
Organization: EE Dept at UF
References: <1992Nov17.023239.3305@marlin.jcu.edu.au> <greg.722092872@coombs>
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 92 07:03:55 GMT
Lines: 43

In article <greg.722092872@coombs> greg@coombs.anu.edu.au (Greg Price) writes:
>eeltw@marlin.jcu.edu.au (Lloyd Walker) writes:
>
>>minimum order.  I have little info on Microchip SP0264 & Sp0256A;
>                                                          ^^^^^^^
>I think Tandy were/are selling the sp0256 and its companion chip the
>cts256a-al2. I just looked up my rod irving catalog and they sell both.
>sp0256 is $21.95 and the cts256a-al2 is $45.50. Rod irving has stores
>in melb and sydney, but they also do mail order. I know the sp0256's 
>output is a bit raspy, but anyway, the cts256a-al2 is a text to phoneme

Actually, the SP0256 received a lot of bad press in its most documented mode 
of operation (in the literature which accompanied the Radio Shack packaging).
Ever wonder what those extra address pins were for? The chip was capable of 
being fed with parameters which took much better advantage of its internal 
structure (vocal tract filter, excitation generators, etc...).

When run in this mode, the output was extremely higher in quality. Much like 
a high quality LPC recording. Intonations and inflections were plainly 
intelligible (but then again, I've been known to watch a snowy TV picture 
if its due to really good skip).

Of course, the bit rate was higher, but using English text input to the 
CTS256 as a comparison is not really comparing apples to oranges.

I can't find my literature on all this, but I think there were some other chips
made to support this family (memory expansion, etc...). I think it was all 
made by General Instrument. I tried to track them down a few years ago, but 
they had been sold off to some other company, and I have been told that the 
new company discontinued the product line.

Its a shame, I am sure many people experimented with this chip without 
discovering its true potential. So now, I have a few questions for the net:

1) Is this chip still manufactured by anyone?

2) Anyone have the official specifications for the extended modes?

3) Any previous General Instruments (I think) people out there that worked on 
this chip?

Thanks,
george@alpha.ee.ufl.edu
