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From: parker@epiwrl.EPI.COM (Alan Parker)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics,comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.tandy
Subject: Re: Building a speech synthesizer for a pc...
Message-ID: <2648@epiwrl.EPI.COM>
Date: 21 Mar 89 16:38:32 GMT
References: <76032JRA102@PSUVM> <gY8R=Ny00V4A00ZVEB@andrew.cmu.edu> <1613@ncar.ucar.edu>
Reply-To: parker@epiwrl.EPI.COM (Alan Parker)
Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Washington, DC
Lines: 21


I have the Heathkit PC speech synthesizer.  Its pretty good and you
can't argue with the price.   It takes about half an hour to stuff the
board, if you've soldered PC boards before. 

It comes with a DOS device driver and a talking terminal emualator.  The
driver includes a simple, but reasonable, text to speech program.  So to
make it talk, all you do is send ASCII text to the "special file"
associated with its driver (SV:, or something like that).

So to talk from C, you just do something like:

FILE *talker = fopen("SV","w");		/* the name of the driver is SV here */
fprintf(talker, "Hello world\n");

You can also send commands directly and bypass their text to speech
program by using escape codes, or writting directly to the board's I/O
address.   The board can generate all sort of neat sound effects this
way.  The board has an output to directly drive a small speaker (which
it comes with), and a line level audio output for feeding an amplifier.
These two signals are brought out on RCA jacks on the rear panel.