Re: Echo II sound cards

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Jay wrote:

>The company that sold them and sells the IBM equivalent is in California.  I
>made some phone calls to them about three years ago.  The manual states that
>there are three ways that the Echo can produce humans speech:  a robotic male
>voice with unlimited vocabulary, a high-quality female voice with a 4000 word
>vocabulary, and a third way.  I was interested in learning more about the 3rd
>option, or how to make my own high quality compressed speech (to have Fred
>Flintstone say, "Yaba-daba-do!" on my Apple II, for example).  The president
>and v.p. of the company are still there, but everyone else is a newbie, Apple
>II-wise.  In the end, they couldn't find the docs, so it was a dead end.

I contacted them in the early 90's, and had a little bit more luck.

The "third way" was to send 8-bit digitized sound samples to the
card and just use it as a D/A converter.  The sample stream mode
ended when a $00 byte was sent, as I recall.

I tried the method, but it didn't work on my Echo card.  I suspect
the problem may have been with the version of the card, but don't
know for sure.

It is possible to send LPC coefficients to the card, since that's
how it makes the phoneme-synthesis sounds (the unlimited
vocabulary "male" voice) and the pre-computed female voice.

I'm not aware of any tools they ever provided to create the
tables of LPC coefficients that make up the female voice
vocabulary tables or the male voice phoneme tables.

-michael

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