Home
Artists
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register
Partychan Telegram ThePornDude
Home Artists Posts Import Register

LGR Oddware - DECtalk PC Speech Synthesizer (Patreon)

Published:
2019-05-10 02:52:53
Edited:
2019-05-11 18:32:53
Imported:
2021-03

Content

Another of those items I've always wanted to talk about, so here we go.

Gotta love old school speech synths and the fact that this one is contained on an ISA card for use with DOS PCs? Doubly enjoyable. Hooray for full-length ISA cards!

While the original DECtalk is pretty well-documented, this PC version has proven to be trickier to figure out. Took some time to track down the right software and I haven't found out how to completely customize the voices through a terminal, but thanks to the documentation and emulator on archive.org I think this is a decent demonstration of the tech for this video at least.

Hope you enjoy!

Files

Oddware DECtalk PC

Comments

Anonymous

Is this the same voice synthesizer used in "Blank Check"? Sounds quite similar.

ChrisFratz

I wonder who here found out about the DEC talk from Druaga1

LazyGameReviews
>>22578128

Quite possibly! As mentioned in the video, it was used in quite a number of movies back in the day :)

Terry Lee

Speaking of speech recognition software, I would love to see a video on Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking and how it works. I'm physically disabled and use Dragon to type what I say, it also does voice commands like closing windows, minimize thing, switch apps, and many other useful tasks. You can also have Dragon read whatever you typed :P I'm sure it's early versions didn't work as well as their modern versions. I also wonder about the difficulties switching from different versions of Windows over the years.

Carey Brown

I always loved these things!! I was amazed by the Talking Parrot demo app that came with the Sound Blaster Pro I got from my Brother in Law.

Anonymous

I swear to god that same voice synthesizer was used in a game called Moonbase Alpha. The singing is what finally jogged my memory.

Anonymous

​But can it make my ROFLcopter go soi soi soi soi soi soi soi, like Microsoft Sam?

Anonymous

"Characterized as sounding like a drunken Swede" is using a lot of words to basically describe Danish, aka Nordic throat disease! 😂 🇩🇰

Anonymous

I love how it’s basically human nature to make anything that can talk curse and say weird stuff, why are we so immature lol

Jim Leonard

Very rare piece of kit -- congrats

Kris Asick

Sounds very much like some of the synthetic voice effects in System Shock... not identical, but very similar... I'm only a few minutes into the video, maybe you noticed that too... :o

Anonymous

Ah Man I love your odd ware series. This reminded me of one of the first things I did when I got my Amiga back in the day. Load up the speech synthesiser and natural progress to such sophistication as getting it to say rude words whilst I giggled like a child (well I still was one to be fair).

Uncleawesome

In the future if I dedicate a basement as my own little museum, I need this to welcome guests

Anonymous
>>22582981

I may be remembering wrong, but the software (using some of the audio hardware features perhaps) on the amiga seemed to pretty much match the dectalk, while the whole computer cost less than the dectalk add on. Why did anyone buy the dectalk by the mid 1980s?

Anonymous

I honestly wish I could use this voice on Google Assistant

Anonymous

Creepy, but awesome!

Anonymous

oh dang! this voice influenced me a lot as a kid when hearing weather warnings on the radio. "seek shelter immEEDIATELY"

Anonymous
>>22590485

I think it was something a little more advanced though by that time though.

Alyxx the Rat

Man speech synths are awesome XD

Vaggumon

Seeing JAWS being used takes me back to my High School days at the Tennessee School for the Blind in the early 90's. This was a huge nostalgia trip for me, thank you.

Anonymous

I haven't watched the full video yet, but I just have to comment on how neatly the right half of your glasses fits into the "Presents:" lettering :D

Anonymous

Great video. I was not aware of this particular speech synth. I guess it was probably prohibitively expensive for the average consumer. You should have prank called somebody with it! :-)

LazyGameReviews
>>22594008

Indeed, I imagine most of them sold outside of the consumer market. I got mine from a university surplus auction, it had been used in classes for the vision impaired! They had dozens of them, all stacked up.

Anonymous

<i>"...sounds something like a cross between Indian and Swedish..."</i> I fail to see how this a problem.

Anonymous

Great video and interesting tech! How do you go about collecting the different news article clippings in your videos? Are they from an online database somewhere or can you find them at some libraries?

LazyGameReviews
>>22602234

Both! I do a lot of searching online for digitized articles, newspapers.com is a great resource. So is Google Books and the archive.org literature library. Beyond that, I have a pretty substantial microfiche archive at my local libraries and universities that I raid as needed. And if all else fails, I track down original printings and scan them myself.

Anonymous

I love how the design aesthetics of the Woodgrain LGR PC and the DECTalk speaker are just meant to be. Also, the intro with you presenting the product was really nice! Great piece of history Clint, Oddware is a great start for the weekend.

Anonymous

Fantastic video as always, Clint! After hearing all the different voices read your gleefully demented sentences, I'm really hoping for an LGR book on tape read by a DECtalk one of these days ;) Also, this video makes me wonder about the history of humans and crap.

Headset Guy

The same speech API was also used in Moonbase Alpha. That's right, the game that brought us "John Madden! John Madden! John Madden! (Football!) John Madden! John Madden!"

LazyGameReviews
>>22608933

Sure is! I snuck in a little Moonbase Alpha astronaut at the bottom right of the video when talking about DECtalk singing :)

LazyGameReviews
>>22604924

Ha! There are actually a couple tapes and records DEC released to demonstrate the system, but an audiobook would be next-level 😁

Anonymous

BAM-BA-LAM

Anonymous

Great video! Just a nitpick: at 7:10, you mention the 1MB RAM but the video seems to show a bunch of 74HCT374 chips which, if I'm not wrong, are D flip-flops (sort of 1-byte register). On the other hand I spotted eight chips in zig-zag in-line package on the top-left corner of the board. Some memory chips were made with that package so I think that's where the 1MB actually is. Cheers!

Evan B

Hah! that was pretty awesome.. thanks for the link to the archive org emulator of this

LazyGameReviews
>>22621073

Glad to hear it! The emulator's a lot of fun, it's wild to me that such obscure devices can be so easily played with by anyone now :)

Nordicberserk

Is something wrong? I keep getting "video removed by owner"

LazyGameReviews
>>22633351

The video link was updated this morning. Should work if you refresh the page. If not try this! https://youtu.be/bPW2S4fZMJY

Anonymous

Sounds pretty similar to ST Talk, which didn't even need additional hardware to work, way before 1992.

Anonymous

Is it possible to make it overflow using that mode that was reading the DOS screen? I wonder if you could stomp on that 1mb of RAM with a large enough output.

Anonymous

This is still used for the National Weather Service out of Greenville/Spartenburg, SC for weather alerts. i can hear it now, that long tone and then "Please stand by for important local weather information" ahhh good stuff

LazyGameReviews
>>22666123

Definitely, there are warnings about this in the software's readme file. Haven't tried though!

LazyGameReviews
>>22678293

They updated it a few years back, but it's still based on DECtalk Paul :) https://blogs.mprnews.org/updraft/2016/06/noaa-weather-radio-has-a-new-voice-and-his-name-is-paul/

Anonymous

Dude, the size of that thing alone cracks me up. Kids nowadays don't know anything about cards sagging :D That "read free for all thing" is hilarious. Did the command slowed down because of the reading or was it just my impression?

LazyGameReviews
>>22751434

Yep, it slows down after a certain number of characters, presumably so as not to surpass the speech synthesis memory :)

Anonymous

I love these old speech synthesizers, reminds me of being a kid, and prank calling friends over the dial-up modem, and using speech synthesizers to mess with them 😀😂...sometimes I miss the 90s😂....

Anonymous

Great video, Clint, but I'm disappointed you didn't make the DEC Talk say "Practice Mooooode" with the deep voice option...

Kadah

Druaga's DECTalk cover of "Tender Lies" is one of the best. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eho0Pb84RmE