The original Speak & Spell toy featured digitized speech, though at such a low bitrate that the result was raspy and robotic-sounding. (This has misled many into thinking that the speech was actually synthesized, like the tech Stephen Hawking used.)
I was wondering if anyone knows the identity of the voice artist who recorded all the words and prompts for the original American edition of the toy. Googling turns up plenty of claims (some attributed to Gene Frantz, one of the toy’s original designers) that the voice belongs to a radio DJ from Dallas, but these claims never seem to include the DJ’s name. Can anyone identify the DJ in question? Has he ever given any interviews about his (anonymous) fame?
Oh, man. This is crazy. I just came across the one my kids had. It doesn’t work any more. I’m gonna buy new batteries for it and see if that will fix it. Haven’t thought of this thing for years.
I always thought it was a CG speech that was talking. Interesting.
It goes into more detail about how the speech was generated but it doesn’t unfortunately identify the original speaker.
I remember when the toy was launched and was featured on a pre-Christmas toy show on Irish TV. The presenter selected the highest difficulty setting and misheard the instruction. The machine had said “Spell ‘rhythm’” but the presenter got it wrong because he heard it as “Spell ‘ribbon’”.
Alas, the batteries didn’t make it work. I used an Emory board and cleaned the little thingy-s in the battery compartment off. Still didn’t work. I really wanted to hear that voice again.
I originally was going to post this to tease Beck, but the video actually has some relative info in it. Although it’s probably above most people’s head who are not in the computer biz.
Am I the only one who originally thought this was about the old Speak-and-Say toy, not Speak-and-spell? You know, the one where you pulled a cord and a little plastic dial would spin and point at a cow and say “The cow goes Moo”. I was very surprised to hear that it used a digital audio chip.
I had the speak and math version …… to help with some math I just couldn’t get a grasp on … grandma made me take it on a trip once …… once I played a multiplication game a few dozen times she regretted that decision
I know they were coming out with a “female” voiced version of the line because they figured since most teachers were female it would help better …. I don’t think they did tho
Up until this post I did think this was about See-n-Says. According to Wikipedia, they now do indeed have a digital chip but before the 90s were a phonograph (!)
