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Cool Speech Synth and Recording Products — Parallax Forums

Cool Speech Synth and Recording Products

Tim-MTim-M Posts: 522
edited 2005-04-08 17:09 in General Discussion
For any of you who may be interested in speech synthisis, text-to-speech and electronic recording/playback, take a look at·http://www.rcsys.com/modules.htm·.· All of their module and chip-set products look very interesting and easily interfaceable to Basic Stamps.· I have my eye on their newest product called (amazingly enough) the V-Stamp.· It looks very powerful and is very reasonably priced - here is a description from the web site:

The V-Stamp is a feature-rich, self-contained voice/sound synthesizer and recorder, measuring only 1.7 square inches in size. Among the V-Stamp's many features are text-to-speech conversion, audio recording and playback, musical and sinusoidal tone generation, telephone dialer and four-channel A/D converter. Operation is from a 3.3 V or 5 V power supply; low-level line and 1-watt speaker outputs are provided.

I wonder if Parallax is aware of this product and would be interested in·using it in conjunction with any of their mocroprocessor families?· Chris... Jon.... anyone have some feedback?

I have no affiliation with RC Systems, I've just followed their product line development for the past few years as I do with so many other products that I'm interested in and like to keep track of.· My personal budget·seems to be·perpetually tight and that is why I follow so much of this interesting stuff verses having it on my bench.... I hope to get to try the V-Stamp soon.

Be sure to check out the Demos on the Downloads menu!

Tim

Comments

  • GuidoGuido Posts: 195
    edited 2005-04-07 00:55
    Looks interesting! Are they addressable?
    Thanks
    Guido
  • Chris SavageChris Savage Parallax Engineering Posts: 14,406
    edited 2005-04-07 02:42
    ·· I've never heard of these chips myself.· But the one thing about them that I noticed is that the one at least had two rows of pins spaced farther apart than a typical DIP spacing (From what I can see).· This makes it hard to implement into projects on a typical breadboard, and more importantly a Parallax board.· I could be wrong about it, I only took a quick look.· But that type of design does affect things like that.



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    Chris Savage
    Parallax Tech Support
    csavage@parallax.com
  • Chris SavageChris Savage Parallax Engineering Posts: 14,406
    edited 2005-04-07 03:14
    ·· As a side-note, that was a personal observation, not a company opinion.· wink.gif··I do also find it interesting though that they're called, "Stamps."

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    Chris Savage
    Parallax Tech Support
    csavage@parallax.com
  • JonbJonb Posts: 146
    edited 2005-04-07 04:30
    Great, another text to speech i can't understand.
    When will someone come out with a lifelike text to speech on a chip.confused.gif Not that I want to lessen their product, but the quality of speech is horrible.

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  • Chris SavageChris Savage Parallax Engineering Posts: 14,406
    edited 2005-04-07 04:32
    Jonb,

    ·· Have you heard one?· Does it really sound bad?· It looks like it's supposed to be a nice sounding chip.· Of course, we have the Emic, which I find to be quite satisfying for speech output.· It sure beats the days when I had to listen to a static-infested recording of myself through the original ISD1000A!



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    Chris Savage
    Parallax Tech Support
    csavage@parallax.com
  • JonbJonb Posts: 146
    edited 2005-04-07 04:35
    The Emic is a nice chip, and the speech quality has much to be desired.
    I am not satisfied with anything I've tried. I find that female voices are easier to understand though. Maybe I'm jaded by my recollections of HAL...


    http://www.palantir.net/2001/sounds.html

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    Post Edited (Jonb) : 4/7/2005 4:39:11 AM GMT
  • Jon WilliamsJon Williams Posts: 6,491
    edited 2005-04-07 04:38
    Unfortunately, you're not going going to find anything better in that price range. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it and it would be very cheap. For the most natural sound, prerecorded human speech is always going to be best -- synthesized speech will always sound, well ... synthesized.

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    Jon Williams
    Applications Engineer, Parallax
    Dallas, TX· USA
  • Fe2o3FishFe2o3Fish Posts: 170
    edited 2005-04-07 04:42
    Chris is right. While the pins on a row are spaced 0.1" apart, the rows are spaced
    more like 1.2" apart. Still, not many "support" components are needed so it may all
    fit onto a BOE.

    For those interested, the sound samples provided on www.rcsys.com/demos.htm
    sound fairly good; I might say just a tad better than the Emic TTS module w/ the Winbond
    chipset on it. With the TTS, sound generation, sound recording and playback, with
    the 4-channel 8-bit A/D converters built in, this looks rather "slick". The quality is
    much better than the SpeakJet (and you'll pay for it too @ $99/module!) but....
    I've been having phun with my SpeakJet!

    Still, I might drop the bucks and get one to tinker with. rolleyes.gif

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    -Rusty-
    --
    Rusty Haddock = KD4WLZ = rusty@fe2o3.lonestar.org
    **Out yonder in the Van Alstyne (TX) Metropolitan Area**
    Microsoft is to software what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
  • steve_bsteve_b Posts: 1,563
    edited 2005-04-07 10:38
    I just ordered one myself!
    My brother puts on a big "production" each halloween for the neighborhood kids (and his own)...so this is the last year for his oldest daughter, and it's to be a big bang!
    I'm already working on "props", some of which are stamp controlled!

    I'll post my results when I get it!

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    ·

    Steve
    http://ca.geocities.com/steve.brady@rogers.com/index.html
    "Inside each and every one of us is our one, true authentic swing. Something we was born with. Something that's ours and ours alone. Something that can't be learned... something that's got to be remembered."
  • Jon WilliamsJon Williams Posts: 6,491
    edited 2005-04-07 12:56
    Your comment about Halloween is interesting ... John Barrowman (Parallax engineer) and I have just started an internal group called Parallax EFX (a forum for EFX will be started later this month) that is designing products specifically for prop builders -- many of those people do things for Halloween. I will be speaking at HauntCon in Dallas, TX (home for me), and at the Midwest Haunters Convention in Columbus, OH. In Dallas we're introducing our Prop-1 Controller -- a BS1 packaged for the prop builder with pin headers, selectable pull-up/pull-down resistors, a ULN2803 for high-current (sink) outputs, and terminal blocks for those outputs.

    Back to the audio topic of this thread, we are investigating several technologies and are working to produce a very high-quality audio player for those that do props and holiday docorations. We just getting started, so there won't be any product for several months.

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    Jon Williams
    Applications Engineer, Parallax
    Dallas, TX· USA
  • Tim-MTim-M Posts: 522
    edited 2005-04-07 19:01
    Jonb,

    Speech synthesis has been an interest of mine for many years and I have followed, and continue to follow,·nearly every product I've ever found any information on.· As far as I'm concerned, the RC Systems products are one of the best and most intelligible (if not·THE best) that I have heard.· And for the V-Stamp you get text-to-speech conversion without having to phoneticly spell the input, you get automatic full pronunciation of·abbreviated words, individual file loading and addressing to output them as you'd like, sine and music generation, A/D converter inputs, recording of your own sounds or voice if you don't care for the synthesized one and all of this for $99!· The development kit does not include the V-Stamp, but it's only $39 - pretty tough to beat.· Listen·to the demos and make the decision for your self.· It just seems to clearly pull out ahead of most others to me.

    Thanks to everyone for the input so far, please keep it coming.

    Tim
  • Paul BakerPaul Baker Posts: 6,351
    edited 2005-04-07 19:34
    It would be nice if someone could implement AT&T's Natural voice system in a chip form, the words are very natural and easy to understand. Though there are still some interword discontinuities, it sounds odd but doesn't affect intelligebility. The program installation calls for 128MB of memory and 500MB of disk space, but Im sure alot of this is overhead for the OS and the development system. An ingenious person could port it over to silicon Im sure, though whether it would be a cost effective implementation I couldn't say.
  • Tim-MTim-M Posts: 522
    edited 2005-04-07 19:43
    Paul,

    I'm not familiar with AT&T's Natural Voice.... know of a link we can go to, to get a·listen to it?

    Tim
  • Paul BakerPaul Baker Posts: 6,351
    edited 2005-04-07 21:01
    Yep, here it is http://caruso.naturalvoices.com/demos/
  • Tim-MTim-M Posts: 522
    edited 2005-04-07 21:43
    Hey thanks Paul, I'll take a listen.

    Tim
  • SteveWSteveW Posts: 246
    edited 2005-04-07 22:35
    I occasionally do some design work for a company that does speech aids for people who can't speak - it's possible, but not trivial, to get very good synthesis from CPUs of the type used in PDAs, and you can get small embedded boards with those CPUs on - sort of like overgrown Stamps. (always going to cost more than a single-chip solution, though, but if you do want to run synths like the AT&T one, it's a reasonable solution).
    There are also some tempting single chips in the pipeline, aimed at text messaging readers for cellphones. They sound pretty good, and are priced, errr, like you'd expect for cellphone parts. Give them a year to knock the bugs out, though [noparse]:)[/noparse]

    Steve
  • StarManStarMan Posts: 306
    edited 2005-04-08 15:55
    I'm sure there are a lot of Stampers familiar with this site.· I'm just posting it for those that aren't.· I've never used them.· I just ran across them one day.· They look a little pricey.

    http://www.bpesolutions.com/
  • Tim-MTim-M Posts: 522
    edited 2005-04-08 17:09
    I agree StarMan, they do look a little pricey, but they do have some very unique circuits and anamitronic related interfaces and modules.

    Tim
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