Date   : Fri, 13 Feb 1987 04:55:14 GMT
From   : "Jay C. Bowden" <jcb%loral.uucp@BRL.arpa>
Subject: Review (short) of Talking Board

I got my B. G. Micro speech card the other night, so
here is a preliminary report.

The board plugs into an IBM-PC or clone, but takes
only power from the bus; you have to have a COM1 or
2 port that you can connect to the thing around back.

When I got it, I checked the baud rate, set it to 1200
for my system, and hooked it to my com port via a 
pin-for-pin cable, re-directed LPT to COM, hit control-P,
and it spoke.

And how well does it speak, this is the burning question.
Not that well.  I fed it some text files, and it was often
intelligible....but it fouls up an awful lot of common
words.  Like "files".  Just "file" sounds great, but
it pronounces "files" like "feels".  What it clearly 
needs is a filter prog in front of it that catches words
and massages the output.  Which brings me to the software
they supply.

It says COMPUTALKER DEMO DISK, and has a trivial example
of making an autoexec file copy a file to the COM1: port.
The only prog the have is called WORDLIST, and is supplied
in basic source and also .EXE compiled versions.
All this prog seems to do is allow you to make up a list
of words vs. what you really want to send to the thing
to sound like that word (eg. files -> file ss).  You
can save this list to disk.  But, as far as I can see, 
there is no way to use this list unless you write your
own prog to do it.

Physical Aspects:

The speaker mounted to the PC board is too high to allow
another board in the next slot; I took it off.  There is
a RCA phono jack on the back of the card in parallel
with the built-in speaker.  No volume control, but a place
for one on the PC board.... I reached into my drawer to
get a 10K pot & soldered it in (you don't have a drawer
like that? There's always Radio Shack...).
Since it does NOT interface to the PC bus, it would be easy
to use on any other system, if you could get the +5,+12 and
-12V somewhere (hmm.. I see the -12 coming in from the connector
on the schematic, but I don't see it going anywhere...
the +5 feeds the allophone chip and the text-to-speech chip,
and the +12 feeds the audio amp.)  By the way, the chips are
the General Instrument SP0256-AL2 allophone chip, and
the CTS256-AL2 code-to-speech chip, which has a built-in
UART.  There is also a 2K RAM chip for buffering the ASCII
stream, and a socket for an Exception EPROM you could
make to improve specific situations if you have the chip
data sheets.



Misc.

They supply a schematic, and about a page or so of notes..
but the chip details like you get from Radio Shack if you
buy the chips are not included.


I'd be glad to answer any specific questions.  A heck of a
bargain at $89.95, from:

       B. G. Micro
       P. O. Box 280298
       Dallas, Texas   75228
       (214) 271-5546
       MC/Visa accepted!


       - Jay