Texas Instruments introduced Speak & Spell

1978
Texas Instruments introduced Speak & Spell

Texas Instruments Inc. introduced Speak & Spell, a talking learning aid for ages 7 and up. Its debut marked the first electronic duplication of the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon. Speak & Spell utilised linear predictive coding to formulate a mathematical model of the human vocal tract and predict a speech sample based on previous input. It transformed digital information processed through a filter into synthetic speech and could store more than 100 seconds of linguistic sounds.

The four individuals who began the Speak & Spell program were Gene Frantz, Richard Wiggins, Paul Breedlove, and George Brantingham.