Electronics
The Speak & Spell used the first single-chip voice synthesizer, the TMC0280, later called the TI TMS5100, which utilized a 10th-order linear predictive coding (LPC) model by using pipelined electronic DSP logic. 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.
Speech synthesis data (phoneme data) for the spoken words were stored on a pair of 128 Kbit metal gate PMOS ROMs. 128 Kbit was at the time the largest capacity ROM in use. Additional memory module cartridges could be interchangeably plugged into a slot in the battery compartment and selected via a button on the keyboard. The technique used to create the words was to have a professional speaker speak the words. The utterances were captured and processed using a mini-computer. Finally the data were hand edited to fix any voicing errors while reducing the data rate to an optimal level. The stored data were for the specific words and phrases used in the Speak & Spell. The data rate was about 1,000 bits per second.
The video-display employed in the Speak & Spell was a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD). The later Super Speak & Spell model, 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.
Read more about this topic: Speak & Spell (toy)
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“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)