Speak & Spell (toy)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the Depeche Mode album of the same name see Speak & Spell (album).

A later Speak & Spell model with membrane keyboard

The Speak & Spell was a popular electronic toy consisting of a speech synthesizer and a keyboard. It was introduced at the summer Consumer Electronics Show in June 1978.[1]

1 Background
2 Electronics
3 Games included
4 Trivia
5 External links

[edit] Background

The Speak & Spell was created by Paul Breedlove, an engineer with Texas Instruments during the late 1970s. Speak & Spell was the first of a three-part talking educational toy series that also included Speak & Read and Speak & Math. The Speak & Spell was sold, with regional variations, in the United States, Canada, and in Europe.

The toy was originally advertised as a tool for helping young children to become literate, learn to spell and learn the alphabet. The early Speak & Spell units were sold in 1978. Variants included the Speak & Read, which was yellow with blue and green accents and focused on reading comprehension, and the Speak and Math ("Maths" in the UK), which was grey with blue and orange and centered on mathematics. A French Speak & Spell, La Dictée Magique, was sold primarily in Canada, while an Italian Grillo Parlante and German Buddy were sold in their respective countries. The German Buddy is particularly rare. The British version of Speak & Spell had a regionalised voice set and supported British English pronunciation.

[edit] Electronics

The display was a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD). The original Speak & Spells had raised hard-plastic keys while later units had a membrane keyboard. The Speak & Spell used the first single-chip voice synthesizer, the TI TMC 0280, which utilized a 10th-order linear predictive coding (LPC) model. A variant of this chip with a very similar voice would eventually be utilized in certain Chrysler vehicles in the 1980s as the Electronic Voice Alert.

A later model, the Super Speak & Spell, had a much slimmer case and an LCD screen rather than a VFD screen.

The unit could use either 4 "C" batteries or 6 volt DC power adapter with positive tip polarity.

[edit] Games included

Speak & Spell had five built-in learning games: Spell, Say It, Secret Letter, Mystery Code, and Word. Spell is the classic word spelling game, wherein the participant must spell ten words after hearing them "spoken" by the unit. The Speak & Spell also had the ability to expand its vocabulary using expansion modules that plugged into a slot near the battery compartment. One such expansion module was a tie-in for the toy's notable appearance in the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and asked young spellers to try such words as "geranium" and "extraterrestrial."

[edit] Trivia

The Speak & Spell shows up from time to time as a pop-culture reference in various television shows and game shows.

Some musicians, primarily club DJs or those in synthpop and electronica, have used the Speak & Spell in their compositions. Examples include LFO, Kraftwerk, Experimental Audio Research, OMD, Polysics, Aphex Twin, Venetian Snares, Moog Cookbook, Meat Beat Manifesto, Hexstatic, Darren Emerson, Freezepop, Optiganally Yours, Sigh, and Circle Research. Comedian Dane Cook impersonates a Speak & Spell on his album Harmful If Swallowed, joking about how the voice sounded like the toy was possessed.

French musician and electronic music godfather Jean Michel Jarre, has used the S&S sound in the track Touch to Remember from his latest album Téo & Téa.