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DecTalk, an early text-to-speech device. The story goes that one member of the team, whose voice was used as the basis for the sounds, lost his voice. Dr. Den
by kjs3 2y ago
DecTalk, an early text-to-speech device. The story goes that one member of the team, whose voice was used as the basis for the sounds, lost his voice.
Dr. Dennis Klatt. He developed cancer (throat of some sort, I'd assume) and did lose his voice but died within a year, AFAIK.
Perhaps more memorable than the very notable DECTalk, he built original voice synthesizer for, and was the voice of, Stephen Hawkings.
- rbanffy 2y agoDECtalk, IIRC, was much higher quality than Stephen Hawking’s voice synth. A real shame to hear this story about the owner of that voice.
- kjs3 2y agoWell...a DECtalk also weighs about 15 lbs and is packed with components. So it was probably a weight/quality tradeoff considering it needed to be mounted on a wheelchair. I understand Hawkings last version use a Raspberry PI, with the original voice.
- rbanffy 2y agoI think the unit was more or less the shape/size of a VT-240. Is that right?
- kjs3 2y agoIt's heavier as noted, but yeah that's a pretty good description.
- rbanffy 2y agoI was a kid when I saw one, in Brazil, at a computer convention. It was, probably "Feira Internacional de Informática" in Brazil, in the early 1980s. The DEC team was incredibly friendly, even to two kids (I went there with a cousin) who would, maybe, be their customers, 20 years later. I became one. My cousin followed another career.