In 1978, Texas Instruments released an educational toy that was among the first consumer products to synthesize speech on a single chip. In 1982, it appeared in a Steven Spielberg film, where a stranded alien built it into a communicator, along with a coat hanger, an umbrella, a record player, and a saw blade, to “phone home.”
What was the toy?
CLUES:
It was a Texas Instruments product launched to help children learn to spell. Its speech chip was designed by a small Texas Instruments team that included Gene Frantz, Richard Wiggins, Paul Breedlove and Larry Brantingham.
It came in a bright orange-red case, had a keyboard with letters in alphabetical order, and played games such as “Mystery Word” and “Secret Code.”
SPOILER ALERT: ANSWER BELOW
Answer: Speak & Spell
The Speak & Spell used the first single-chip voice synthesizer, the TMC0280, later known as the TI TMS5100, which utilized a 10th-order linear predictive coding (LPC) model by using pipelined electronic DSP logic.