<nostalge> Way back in the mid-1980s in the United Kingdom, and there were few places more 80s than that, Superior Software produced Speech!, a software speech

<nostalge> Way back in the mid-1980s in the United Kingdom, and there were few places more 80s than that, Superior Software produced Speech!, a software speech synthesis program for the BBC Micro, a 6502-based machine running at 2MHz which didn't have PCM audio. It could reasonably reliably read out ordinary English text in a fairly robotic voice. It was 7.5kB of 6502 machine code. There's a writeup from the author here: http://rk.nvg.ntnu.no/bbc/doc/Speech.html http://rk.nvg.ntnu.no/bbc/doc/Speech.html and a demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8wyUsaDAyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8wyUsaDAyI It was an utter sensation (featuring, among other places, as the computer voice in Roger Waters' Radio Kaos). It's obviously not going to win awards, being barely intelligable, but if you can achieve that with a table of 49 phonemes each of 128 4-bit samples, then producing basic speech isn't that hard. I think that mespeak.js, which is what this demo is based on (which is pretty cool, BTW) is based on the same principle, although with obviously better samples. (Unlike producing human sounding speech, which is appalling difficult.)