Steven Weyhrich wrote:
My Apple II History states that the Ensoniq chip is capable of speech
synthesis. However, when I was questioned about this, I was unable to come
up with any examples when that was actually used. Some other sound
hardware
released in the 1980s allowed use of phonemes to create speech, but I am
not aware of any simple speech abilities in the IIGS.
Does anyone know of whether the IIGS could do speech with the Ensoniq, or
was my source (wherever it was) incorrect about that?
As others have said, the Ensoniq is a general-purpose chip. There were
peripherals made for the earlier Apple models that were dedicated to speech
synthesis.
The Ensoniq requires more code behind it to make ad-hoc speech synthesis. I
suspect that most but not all GS programs that had speech in them were using
pre-recorded samples.