Fuller Orator

ZX Computing

Tony Woods

TALKBACK: SPEECH UNITS ASSESSED When you find you get to the stage where you find yourself talkiing to your micro, it helps if it answers back! From the time the Daleks trundled across our TV screens muttering "Exterminate, Exterminate" in their chillingly inhuman voice, I have been intrigued by speech synthesizers. At the time of writing, and to the best of my knowledge, there are six different units on the market to enable your micro to answer you back. Two others have recently lost their voice, I asked why, but the suppliers aren't talking. The units on the market at the moment are "Sweet Talker" from Cheetah for both ZX81 and Spectrum, "Micro Speech" from Currah, "Orator" from Fuller, "Vox Box" from Datel Electronics, "Chatterbox" by William Stuart Systems, and "S-Pack" by DCP. I contacted all of the above companies and those units that were supplied for review I sent to different reviewers for their independent comments. For your own assessment here's what they thought.... ORATOR Fuller Micro Systems [redacted] £34.95 A neat black plastic box which fits snuggly onto the back of the Spectrum and is identical in size and shape regardless whether it contains the Orator on its own or the complete Master Unit. It has a through bus allowing all the ZX peripherals to be attached, a cassette interface enhancing the signal and allowing both leads to be left in place when LOADing and SAVEing, and a joystick interface. The unit is supplied with a demonstration tape and what are alleged to be complete instructions. These are too verbose, complicated and ill defined for the novice to understand easily. With its amplifier and larger speaker it gives the Spectrum a controllable audio output, although this requires a plastic screwdriver as no Knob is supplied - a metal one turns it into a radio! It can also be connected to your Hi-Fi system. The speech bit of it uses the G1-SP025A speech processor with a single chip N-channel MOS/LSI circuit that will synthesize speech via a stored program. Speech is created by an allophone system which is accessed by utilising port 159. In practical terms each allophone is operated by sending numbers with OUT 159,n - where n is the appropriate numeric value assigned to that sound. The unit is complex to program, step by step simple instructions would have helped, and it has the annoying habit of being incompatible with some commercial programs causing a crash or system reset or irritating unstoppable hiss. The quality of sound can be very good, clear and distinct, but I'm afraid the programming takes up too much time for me to make frequent use of it.