The Currah Speech 64, which came out in 1983, is a speech synthesizer cartridge for the Commodore 64. In those days most speech synthesizers used a preset vocabulary and were therefor somewhat limited in their talking skills. The Currah Speech 64 uses a different approach.
Instead of a preset vocabulary the Currah Speech 64 uses a set of 58 allophones. By cleverly combining those allophones words can be formed. This allows for true text-to-speech, which is a pretty neat thing for 1983 on an 8bit system.
The inside of the cartridge holds a General Instruments SP0256-AL2 speech processor and dedicated memory. So it doesn’t create sounds using the SID-chip (sound is send to the SID-chip, which in turn redirects it to the output), nor does it use the C64s’ memory.
My Currah Speech 64 stops working after a few minutes, so lets try and fix my cartridge and then see if we can make my Commodore 64 talk. 🗣️
