How Speech Synthesis Made this '80s Toy Affordable
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- čas přidán 12. 09. 2024
- Let's take a look at the Talking Computron, an educational "pre-computer" toy sold by Sears in the 1980s. This is interesting for a few different reasons, but the use of speech synthesis as a cost-saving measure is particularly intriguing.
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The Sears Wishbook for 1988 lists it on special for $37.99 or $42.99 after December 15th of that year. Additional cartridges were $12.99, and the optional AC adapter was $9.99.
Oh awesome, that’s great information! Thank you for sharing!
@@serialhobbyism_official You're more than welcome. None of the archives of Christmas catalogs and Wishbooks out there are particularly well-indexed, so it's all too easy to overlook them in a search. Another good source for more general items, as long as they were sold in the UK, is Argos catalogs. A very thorough archive of them exists in places.
My grandmother bought one of these for me for, I think, Christmas '88. We absolutely had trouble understanding some of the words, got bored with it quickly, and never saw any expansion use.
Ha, that sounds about right! How old were you when you got it?
Holly crap I forgot that thing existed. I had one when I was a kid.
Whoah flashbacks, we didn't have this but did have the Speak & Spell, and later The talking Whiz Kid.
Totally had technology connection vibes with your format. Great work.
Thank you!
I had one of these and it was my favorite toy. I credit it to me being able to read, spell, and do arithmetic at such an early age.
That’s awesome! Do you remember what cartridges you had?
@serialhobbyism_official it was just the original built-in programming. I wish I could've tried the different cartridges, but I don't think my parents even realized you could get more.
Hearing "One Hendred" takes me back. My grandparents had one of these, I loved playing with it.
The Speak & Spell was very popular and arguably less capable, but the Speak & Spell also had really attractive industrial design for a kid--that carrying handle invited you to take it everywhere.
(The Speak & Spell also came out several years earlier--it was a mind-blowing device out of science fiction for 1978, maybe less so by the mid-1980s. The model in the ads you show here is a later one with a membrane keyboard--I always loved the little round buttons the first model had.)
I forgot I had one these until I saw you using it! I had one in the 90s because my mom picked one up at a yard sale lol
Very cool! Do you remember what cartridges you had?
@@serialhobbyism_official I was one of the unfortunately bored kids who had to play with it without cartridges lol
@@jonathanheim5842 😂😂
Not a hundo, but I think this might have been my first (toy) computer. Amazing back and fourth in my head as I keep wondering if this was it. I think I've misremembered it being more sophisticated, which is making me think it was. We were at my Aunt's and Uncle's for that Christmas...my cousin was so the jealous, and, as kids are, I was jealous of whatever he was playing with, and neither one of us wanted to share at the same time...kids.
your guess of $30 seems WAY too low to me... even back then, most toys with a computer chip in them were $50+ if not far more. I used my Speak & Spell all the time, and the only reason I didn't have Speak & Math was due to it being rather expensive.
Think so? To be clear, I meant $30 in 1986 dollars. But I very well could have been wrong. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an original ad or catalog.
Most of the 8-bit computer magazines ran articles on interfacing a speech synthesiser chip. I built one for my Atari 800 computer back in the Elder Days. You could buy the speech chip, at Radio Shack for maybe 10-15 bucks.
I love the name Computron. I was think it could be a rebranded Grandstand, and seeing the other model confirmed it. We had various Grandstand ones here in the UK. They were all white and green.
Synthesized speech at that time is much more complicated than using PCM or delta modulation used in digital audio existing at that time, the advantage is that it did not need much storage: it imitates the naso-laringeal tract by electronic means, the square (in fact pulse wave) generator you mention is the vocal chords , the tongue are are series of 3 digital filters with variable frequency that simulate the ever changing tongue movements as a resonator (because the voice is composed by those "formant" frequencies as how they are called), the occlusive sounds were made by modulating amplitude, fricative and nasal sounds are created with the help of a pseudo random noise generator. You just need to store the how and not the voice sounds but it is not just one byte, you still need to store the frequencies, varying with time, the noise envelope, the pulse envelope, all that was kept inside the chip, it is still much less than storing the digital sound, you have the illusion using the chip because all you need is to send the phonemes required and the chip does all the magic. But it was a real piece of sophisticated engineering in terms of theory and development. It was only made viable because all that could be integrated on a chip and not even a very complicated one. But the details were incredibly complex to do in a way that the voice didn't sound like the first talking computer singing "Daisy, Daisy give me your answer do...". Your explanation despite of capturing the very general idea is misleading.
The voice synthesizer Steven Hawking used is from that time, that is why his voice sounded so dated, he attempted to use a and a more natural modern one by Intel that has a very real voice but quickly changed his mind as that robotic sounding voice from the 80s felt like his real voice because at that time he was using it for decades.
Thanks for providing more detail! That is definitely above my head, so I appreciate it!
You might think this is speech synthesis, but it's not. The lpc (linear predictive code) format, which this uses, is a way of storing audio, usually speech clips, in a very compressed way. All it's storing is a set of frames that each defined what frequency a saw wave or set of saw waves should be at for a given point in time. In this case it is not truly speech synthesis since it is still playing back recordings and can't say anything outside what was recorded. The echo 2 speech synth for the apple 2 used LPC, but in that case the recordings were just the phonemes that make up speech, which makes that able to be classified as a proper speech synthesizer.
Ah, that's an interesting distinction that I hadn't thought about!
I had one of these when I was young; your video covered more than I remember.
I had one of these. I wish I could recall which cartridge I had, but it wasn't one of the four we saw here. I played with it quite a bit since it was portable and there wasn't much else to do on a long car ride. I still have it someplace I bet, minus the AC adapter and battery cover lost to the years.
That's a very good point that I totally forgot to mention in the video: it can run on batteries or AC (with the adapter). I'd really like to know what other cartridges were available!
They were selling one of these at the corner store when i was 8 or 9 and I begged my mom for it since it was the only “computer” we could remotely afford. I loved my little “computer” though I was disappointed I couldn’t do more with it.
Sounds like you were the target market! What ended up being your first "real" computer?
@@serialhobbyism_officialit was a handmedown 386 (i think) with Win 3.1 installed. In 1997! 😅
My favorite toy as a kid. I remembered when the batteries were about to die, the speech thing would say things that sounded like swear words, and mom took it away. Also, I remember it pronouncing the word oven as "Oh-Ven".
Very interesting! Was low voltage slowing down the output, maybe? Now I want to try manually feeding it a low voltage from a power supply to see what it does!
@@serialhobbyism_official it really sounded satanic. I don't remember if it used c or d batteries, but I do remember them not lasting long. And yes, my grandma got me this toy because I said I was in the computers. I laughed out loud at that line.
I was born/live in the UK and I've only been to the US as a tourist, but something about this is giving me a lot of childhood flashbacks - Something's telling me that I had something like this at some point as a kid. 🧒
Now Sears have never traded in the UK (Or if they have, not under that name) but a lot of American and British companies were white-labelling each others product for cross-Atlantic distribution at the time (British-made LCD games are a good example of this) and I vaguely remember a -Tomy- Grandstand product which had a lot of common characteristics to the Computron.
The case was a different style and colour (Green plastic front shell, white plastic rear) but also had speech synthesis, an 8-character LED display, and an annoyingly difficult to use membrane keypad, so I'd guess the -Tomy- Grandstand product was the same Sears Computron internally, but repackaged for the British market. 🖥🇬🇧🛍
You might've sent me down a rabbit hole with this one. If I dig up some clearer info I'll edit it into this comment. 😇👍
*Edit:* Posted the incorrect brand. The UK version that I had was the _Grandstand: First Talking Computer_ and there were two versions; Later one without the cartridge port to save costs. 😇
Now that is interesting! Apparently there was a Tomy Tutor, which was an actual computer similar to a TI-99/4A. I’ll try to do some digging and see if I can find some of their other devices from the era. You’re 100% right about designs being rebranded. For example, I have a Timex-Sinclair 1000, which is just a ZX81.
@@serialhobbyism_official Just checked, and I have a slight *correction* to make: The product was the *Grandstand* _First Talking Computer_ and not a Tomy product. The Grandstand version is practically identical to the Sears except for colour and minor cabinet differences. 🇺🇸🖥🇬🇧
Tomy _did_ have a toy computer of their own (Which I also had) but this was simply a clockwork spelling aid aimed at younger children. 😇
Also: Interestingly enough, from looking at current eBay listings (Item numbers 116209949947, and 387063395758) it seems like there were *two* versions sold in the UK; The first identical to the Sears model, the second (The one I had, likely a later revision) a lower cost version that omitted the cartridge slot. A key visual difference between them is the latter doesn't have the „Theme Spelling“ function on the J key. 😇
@@dieseldragon6756 great find! Apparently Vtech made these devices and sold them under the Sears Computron and Grandstand names, then later starting using their own name. That makes sense, because here in the US vtech became THE “educational electronic toy” company. I wish I had that info before filming 😂
@@serialhobbyism_official The comments are always a great source of information on stuff like this! 😁
I'm trying to find a teardown to see if the UK Grandstand ones were basically the same Sears component set flat-packed and shipped to the UK for fitting into locally made plastics¹, and the UK version definitely uses the same TI chip with the same American accent! 😋
(¹ - We have a company locally that does the same thing with flat-packed bus chassis built in Hong Kong with final assembly here, so this seems like a reasonable technique for toys too. If Sears/VTech were building the innards as complete sets it'd also save them having to divulge technical specifics to the partner company as well, which was as much a preference then as it is today. 😇)
@@dieseldragon6756 Good point! Maybe I'll try to get a Grandstand and compare the innards...
I’ve two, “Grandstand” branded Talking Computers from “back-then”
I bought them to circuit-bend, but decided this stuff’s getting a bit hard to get now so decided to be their guardian instead..
I enjoy getting it to randomly recite its vocab as it sometimes sounds like poetry..?
Oh, I should also add..
I’m on a mission to find a way of using the cart slot on a TI Speak & Spell to add new vocab..
Arduino and Raspberry Pi are on standby to assist..
I was thinking about doing something like that! But it would be at the end of a very long list of other projects, haha. If you're able to pull it off, I'd love to see it!
I had this toy.
In my experience, if you couldn't make it say custom/naughty words. These things would get forgotten pretty quickly.
Ha, good point!
It would not let you .those things were pre programed to recognize bad words and if you spelled one out mine would just bleep instead of talking .
@@ionamoebam5931 very interesting! I should have looked into that!
The companion word chips where 16 Kbit (TMS6100) or 32 kbit (TMS6125) and could store 650+ or 1300+ words each.
so a built in 32kbit chip with just dummy/unlock carts would make the most sense.
However the TMS6100/TMS6125 chips only need 10 pins (this includes power and ground) and the cards have 12 pins.
So a hybrid approach of dummy chips and real rom chips where likely intended. but i still don't understand the 120 word limit per card.
Good info! The hybrid idea is interesting… my best guess is that they wanted to be able to potentially sell lots of different carts, so they didn’t want to include too many words with each one.
I had one of those to got it on my birthday i think i was 7 i would spend hour's playing with it when i could not play Nintendo because we only had one Tv and video game time was rationed .
Had one as a kid and just ordered one on ebay for the nostalgia. Too bad you can't get ebay kickback!
I’m just happy to help bring back some happy memories!
We had a nearly identical product in Australia with the same keyboard, display, speech synth and software, but in a slightly different enclosure called Talking Lesson One. I could never understand that mystery word @12:34 either - I'm about 99% sure it was "biscuit"
"Queen" was the other word I remember not being able to understand. It sounded like "Hoin" to me.
Very interesting! That does seem like it could fit!
Yep, I had one I got for christmas either in 86 or 87. I also had A Day to Bake and Rocket to Zenod. I remember seeing these carts at Sears and to me looked like there were more than just 4 as far as I remember. I actually like this machine although I did have a hard time understanding the voice half the time. Great video, thank you!
That’s cool to know that there might have been more cartridges! Thanks for sharing!
@@serialhobbyism_official Is it possible Sears might've „expanded“ the four cartridges to appear like a larger range on the racks? Stores and product were really pushing for shelf presence back then, so „expanding“ a range of four cartridges to look like a lot more (e.g: By having half of them the wrong way around, so visually the range _looks_ more diverse) might've been a common floor technique at the time. 😇
I distinctly remember that „Full stores, with full shelves“ was very much a thing back in the mid 80s, at least on this side of the pond... 🇬🇧
@@dieseldragon6756that’s definitely possible!
12:44 Biskit
Oct Tave the Brave.
Octave will live.
It was not very fun for me, no. And it didn't come with the power cable, at least mine didn't, so it was also often out of commission as I used the batteries for more interesting toys. I think that word might be biscuit, tho.
12:40 English is not even my first language and I'm pretty sure it's "bisquit".
What about the Atari 8-bit...??
kewl (6 days ago)
Biscuit
It sounds almost to me like it's saying "bacon".
I checked the list of words on that wasn’t on there 😞
This word used to get me too, I'm 99% sure it was "biscuit"
My bad ears thought they heard Egypt or aged as two syllables.
Oh so it’s the I.Q My First Talking Computer but uglier and American 😅 the one in the UK was green and white and looked really cute!oops sorry mistaken it was Grandstand My First Talking Computer
I'll never understand the amount of stupidity required to ruin one's own ear lobes like that
I had a horrible accident with a bow and arrow as a kid, so I decided to make the most of it.
He oddly gives me a Tom DeLonge from Blink182 vibe, so it kinda works. Attractive guy. 😊
@@phlash65-5 aw, thank you! Funny enough, I’ve been told MANY times that I look like Tom Delonge!
We have these talking toys as a kid. 90% of the time we were trying to get them to say cuss words
I think I had a British version of this, and as a man who is fiercely Metric (A _Just-joined-the-EEC_ education will do that to you! 📏🇪🇺😉) I can say mine came out with _plenty_ of four-letter words... 😳
_Yard, Pint, Foot, Mile, etc etc..._ 🙃