The Iconic 80s Speech Synthesizer: DECtalk for PC - LGR Oddware
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.ย. 2024
- Released in 1984 the DECtalk DTC-01 was THE classic 80s speech synthesizer, used for everything from weather stations to movies. Today on Oddware we have the DECtalk PC from 1991, an ISA card for converting text to speech on MS-DOS PCs!
● Links to the resources mentioned:
www.archive.or...
• all dectalk songs
• DecTalk Singing Tutori...
● Download an archive of the drivers and software I've found:
archive.org/de...
● LGR links:
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
● Music courtesy of:
www.epidemicsou...
#LGR #Oddware #Synthesizer
![Megan Thee Stallion - Neva Play (feat. RM) [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/TpYTyAaTRts/mqdefault.jpg)
DECtalk provides a realistic simulation of human voice
John Madden
AEIOU
Football
Ebrbrbrbrbrbrbr
Here comes another Chinese Earthquake
aeiou
As an accessibility professional, this history of screen readers and AAC was fascinating! You can still use that voice on the latest version of JAWS today. Thank you so much for making this!
Glad you liked it!
I am mostly blind, and remember using very early versions of Jaws that have that voice.
Big same I was like WOAH THATS OLD JAWS
Yes at all nightmare inducing!!
I hate jaws
My mum used to have one of these on her computer in the 90's because she is vision impaired. This is a real flash back.
any moonbase alpha player would feel right at home using this thing, or the other way around
John Madden?
LGR: "Dectalk singing, hah hah. Thats a whoooole other realm..."
moonbase alpha player: "My realm that is"
That game taught me so much about DECTalk commands. In fact that why I want some of the vintage hardware.
[naenaenaenaenaenaenaenaebaettmaenn]
john madden john madden john madden john madden john madden john madden aeioiaoaeiaeoaieoiae john madden ?
>singing DECtalk
See Hatsune Miku, this is your grandpa
I laughed harder than what I should have
*Sony Project Diva
Makes me think of that nasa game. JOHN MADDEN JOHN MADDEN JOHN MADDEN
Someone should make a fanart with miku meeting an anthropomorphic dectalk
no, the ibm 7904 is her grandpa
I love that we can see your face in the reflection. Feels like I'm watching a Strong Bad Email.
ah strong bad emails, those were the days
Trogdor still lives homestarrunner.com/sbemail58.html
They even have board games at the homepage
What's gonna happen once flash craps itself?
That rendition of Spooky Scary Skeletons scared the living crap out of me.
I loved it!
My Rittle Pony
AEIOU
It sent shivers down my spine.
As opposed to the undead crap?
I wasn't sure until I heard the singing, but this is definitely the TTS in moonbase alpha
JOHN MADDEN. JOHN MADDEN. JOHN MADDEN. FOOTBALL.
*Big American TTS*
Unreal Engine 3 simulates DECTalk voice synthesis for text to speech. It also works the same in Viscera Cleanup Detail, since it's the same engine.
AEIOU
Mama mia papa pia
Baby got the Diareaaaaaaaaaaa
Boy; the amount of time that must've been spent aligning the camera with the background and table. Well done.
Yes extra hardware needed
Hi guys welcome to my DECtalk
*J O H N M A D D E N*
Thank you
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh John madden
aeiou
Holla holla get $
Hahaha
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhheheheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Make it say
"Mattel Electronics presents: B17 Bomber"
BEEEEEEE SEAVUNTEEEN BAAAAUUUUWWWWMEERRRRR
I think you mean BEEEEEEE SEAVUNTEEEN BAAAAUUUUWWWWMEERRRRR
I tried, but I was having weird issues.
"Alright, fuck the game, let's try Bomb Squad"
AAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSS
That nintendo nerd reference!
*Types "I love you".
Presses play repeatedly while crying.
lol
*Sad violin kicks in*
**Computer shuts itself off.**
404 error. Phucks not found. 😹
Time to build an android woman around it and build the speaker in her mouth.
I love how old computers sound like someone talking while they are breathing in, if you don't know what I'm talking about... talk while you are breathing in... it's hysterical. Be careful it can make you a little light headed.
Aadin Heals don’t try this when eating chocolate it will sufficate you
Oh! I just tried it (just a little bit) and I know what you mean.
@@robbinhasseltof4428 or tidepods
I'm crying 😂
4:35 Seen that thing before in a group home for disabled children in the mid-late 2000's, it was called a "Springboard" and the non-verbal children would use it to communicate, before iPads became available enough for group homes to adopt those. I remember one of the children at the group home had a compulsion to say he wanted whatever he decided he was going to eat off his plate before eating, so it'd go like this:
[has special juice with vitamins and stuff because he was a very picky eater]
[taps button]
I
[taps another button]
WANT
[taps another button]
DRINK
[drinks juice]
I imitated the voice a few times and once jokingly hit "Apple" over and over again.
APPLE. APPLE. APPLE. APPLE.
The non-verbal user of the Springboard was amused by me screwing with the device and started repeatedly hitting APPLE to show his amusement.
Those things were just as expensive, if not even more so, than the DECtalk itself. The assistive device industry is so insular that the manufacturers could basically set whatever price they want for these and people will pay it- pretty much the sky is the limit.
I enjoyed this. I never had the PC card but the DecTalk express synthesizer. I'm a blind user and relied on that for my computing needs - funny how I've gone entirely iOS these days and braille in text rather than typing but there it is.
Thanks for the video.
Do you have retinitis pigmentosa?
This is so under appreciated. This device was the predecessor of what we now know was JAWS and VoiceOver, and was the only option for many people until JAWS for DOS came out.
You'll never see the cool graphic in the intro
@@gregorymalchuk272 bro, he can't read your comment, don't be an ass.
I love those speech synthesizers, they sound sooo terribly retro futuristic!
Also, John Madden!
I'm a web developer and quite often work with JAWS to make sure sites are accessible, I had no idea it went so far back!!
Hanna I had heard of it being an accessible software but I too didn’t know it went back to DOS days. Learn something new everyday!
And you have dragon maid as your servant right?
Neither did I until recently, and I had no clue this early version was freeware. I started using JAWS in demo mode as a kid in the late 90s and have seen it grow a lot, but wow! It's all pretty amazing!.
From a screen reader user, thanks for everything you do. We really appreciate it!
Sound Thinking You said it! I had no real idea what goes into web access until I worked in my university's office of disability services the last two semesters. As a JAWS user, I was never on the other side of access. I need things accessible but never thought what went into making that happen. This was a new realm for those I worked with to explore. We were learning from the ground up about web access. However, we tried our best to do accessibility reviews for school web pages. The absolute amount of minutia needed to be complient through things like the WCAG 2.0/2.1 levels A at bare minimum, AA preferably, but AAA ideally astounds me. It took months for us to learn how to even properly review our web pages. We eventually found a template that worked for us and reviewed several pages using WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines. I can't imagine how difficult it might be to create those pages.
Anyway, my point is I have massive respect for web and app devs, especially those who can make their pages easily accessible to screen reader users and others. Thank you for your hard work, Hanna.
Thank you for making it say farts, I knew I could count on you.
Fitter, happier
More productive
Comfortable
Not drinking too much...........
Sapfu100 regular exercise at the gym(3 days a week)
I was just thinking about typing this into the emulator he mentioned
Damn you beat me to it
Will frequently check credit at moral bank, hole in wall
you mentioned dynavox once in the video, my mother used the tobii dynavox with eye motion since she lost the ability to speak clearly and was unable to control a computer like she used too. paired with alexa, we could here it telling alexa what to do.
dynavox: alexa change channel to 164
alexa: changing to channel 164 on fios
*tv channel was changed*
Whoaaa DecTalk Betty, Bam-a-lam!
@Daniel Glover it's the song Black Betty by Ram Jam. It's a play on the lyric" Woah, Black Betty, Bam-a-lam"
8:47 - let's get the speaker on to a tray....nice.
Ha I get it
No hiss
lol
@Kevin Amandius Køhler Not as good as the US MRE spoons I hear
I love the DECtalk. It's perfectly understandable yet still has the "charm" of vintage computing. It's like a monochrome amber display in audio form.
The whole speech synthesis is really cool, and the DECtalk singing reminds me of the really early VOCALOID software created by Yamaha from the early 2000's or a lot of the UTAUloid voices (freeware VOCALOID) (yes we all expected that some weeb would mention Vocaloids)
DECtalk is in Chipspeech, which is like a Vocaloid museum.
Well someone did turn dectalk Paul into an utaloid it’s pretty similar to a vocaloid
th-cam.com/video/LSQJ5vlWv5k/w-d-xo.html
Putting a speaker on top of a box floppies ... that was brave.
Yeah it's a bit of a gamble, but i don't think that weak mono speaker there will demagnetize the floppies from that far away.
@@GashimahironChl Mono speaker?
I mean, it's a single speaker so i guess saying it's a mono speaker was kinda redundant.
@@GashimahironChl ;)
Speakers can damage floppies magnetically? Can someone explain?
"Drying mode on. Jacket drying. Your jacket is now dry."
*_BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!_*
And here we are in 2020 and we still don't have that technology. Or hoverboards for that matter.. :(
@@fuzzydunlop1753 we just made jackets that don't get wet
My father in law worked for digital in the 80s and 90s. Can't wait to show him this.
I too worked for DEC in the early 90s as a hardware designer - networking stuff. Good times :)
My first employer used DEC x86 -based PCs running Windows NT Workstation 4.0. Now while NT 4.0 was meh, those PCs were some of the more pleasant to service/work on. Was saddened when they were bought out by Compaq...
"Push me. And then just touch me. Till I can get my, satisfaction"
Oh yeah. its the same voice.
Satisfaction Satisfaction Satisfaction
He should play a cover with 8-bit keys...
Put your hands up... Oh wait
@@lashyndragon for Detroit, a lovely city.
The history of accessibility hardware and software is so fascinating. Imagine what a huge difference this technology made in so many people's lives. In the '90s I had a co-worker who was 100% visually impaired and with the help of technology like this (not sure if it was exactly this) she was the hardest-working, most essential person in our entire office.
Tommy LaKindaSorta Yes drinking too much...
My New Year’s Resolution is to use “Baby got the diarrhea” in everyday conversation
"sometimes I think about the future of humans and crap" classic LGR
The introduction for every voice was just pure gold
I don't know about the future of humans, but I'm pretty sure I know what the future of at least one crap is.......
@@thelegendaryklobb2879 you can tell he was genuinely having fun with them
kill all humans
It was very cool to hear an actual Stephen Hawking quote.
This voice sounds so exceptionally familiar...
*Oh my god, no. You take your memes and you think about what you've done!*
Aeiou.
Aeiou
John Madden
I would love someone to code Doom with this so every-time you shoot it says Pew! Pew! Pew!
Sure it would be easier to just play a wav, but not nearly as fun.
Kenneth Pedersen someone modded half life 2 to use nothing but vocal sounds was hilarious
I can imagine Betty saying, "I'll see you again, in twenty-five years. Meanwhile."
And then incomprehensible screaming.
Actually Prof Hawking continued using his speech synth because it was based on the voice of the man who made it for him which ended up becoming one of his best friends. The man passed away and Hawking refused upgrades not because it became iconic with him, but because he wanted to honor his friend's memory.
Voice turned out to be easy... speech recognition turned out to the hard nut to crack. But in the beginning researchers had it backwards... they thought speech would be difficult to solve.
Why?!
Depends what your criteria is I guess. I mean though modern speech synthesizers are certainly understandable there's still a lot of work to be done to make them sound truly human.
Speech recognition has also come a long way. It's not 100% accurate of course but then neither are human transcribers...
Lots of early AI researchers made this kind of mistake. It was also expected that walking and vision would be easy, but things like advanced symbolic algebra and calculus would be hard (despite complex linear algebra on machines being a solved problem before WWII, look it up, it helped break the ENIAC patent on electronic computers). That was all backwards. Algebra and calculus work on precisely codified rules, which are relatively easy to convert to machine instructions. Walking, talking, seeing, and hearing depend on incredibly complex neurological systems that we still only have a vague understanding of. We basically had to solve all those problems by hand without a lot of guidance from how nature does it. This is why it's taken about 50 years to get autonomous vehicles even close to being ready for general use.
Yep. Its one of those thing that because it comes so easy to us that we assumed it be easy for a machine.. You don't struggle to understand someone with a slightly different accent to you. So why would a machine?
But it just went to show us how little we understood how things work, and how complex they truly are.
PLEASE make DECtalk say "Practice Mode" in that deep voice. I beg you.
There's PC ports of DECtalk you can download yourself if you search for them!
OMG, this is definitely one of my favorite videos of yours! I use JAWS and its Apple counterpart, VoiceOver, daily. I've been using JAWS since the late 90s, so I never knew how JAWS worked in the early days with hardware voice synthesizers. They still use these voices you covered in things like the talking version of the TI83 graphing calculator.
My ears are thankful that synthesized speech has improved dramatically since then, though those old voices are still so much fun.
It's amazing now I can just go download so many voices for JAWS off their website, yet people 25+ years ago had to get a whole expensive sound card for JAWS. BTW, JAWS itself is still crazy expensive, costing around $1000 with roughly $240 paid every couple years to keep the software maintinance agreement active. If I hadn't been using JAWS for 20 years I'd probably use a free and very good alternative called NVDA.
WHEN I was a kid, I didn't own a full version of JAWS, so had to download the 40 minute demo mode version of JAWS, I think I did this starting with version 4 and ending with version 9.0 when I got the state to pay for it for college,. I downloaded the demos off their website using good ol' America Online!!! No comment, we had AOL until 2008 and no broadband until like 2016. Anyway, man, that thing took all night to download, sometimes never finishing, whereas now I can download a JAWS update in less than a minute... That 40 minute mode was crazy horrible, I'd have to restart my PC literally every 40 minutes. They still use that model for newer JAWS demos today if you're curious how old JAWS 2.3 compares to new JAWS 2018, I think they're calling it. They stopped the numbered releases with JAWS 18 back in like 2017 because they were bought by or merged with another company who chaned the nameing system for JAWS releases.
Sorry for my rant, but I loved this video. It's one of my favorites from you, aside from the Sims pack reviews you do which strongly influance my purchases. I've so rarely seen classic speech synthesis covered, even rarer for it to be linked to early JAWS, rarer still for this all to come from a sighted guy. If I'd not been subscribed to you for years already I'd subscribe to you in an instant! You put out some quality videos!
There is no incentive to bring the price down considering the narrow target audience- these companies typically have only a few thousand customers at the most and the cost of developing the software is very high. It's the reason why eye trackers still can cost as much as a compact car. Even at that price they are probably not making much profit and they often depend on product support fees. Basically these people can name a price and people will pay it because there is so little competition.
"A swede with a speech impediment". Did you mean a Dane?
@@rastas_4221
Americans don't know any accents.
Any American that says they can do "a good Australian accent" either sounds British or like a drunk New Zealander.
@@Her_Imperious_Condescension South African is also a common result
No, Swedish sound like a drunkard with a speech impediment, so it was pretty close.
A swede with a speech impediment? So you mean just a swede?
Nice one lol
"We're whalers on the moon. We're whalers on the moon."
We carry a harpoon
But there ain't no whales,
So we tell tall tales
And sing our whaling tune!
HEY FUTUREAMA!!!!
"I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Clint"
the cognitive dissonance of hearing that woodgrain make the clang of a hollow sheet of metal is satisfying
I love early speech synthesis. More fun to make a DECtalk say "BUTTSBUTTSBUTTS" than it is to make a modern synthesizer say it.
"Balls, farts, and things!"
This thing reminds me a lot of Tomodachi Life for the 3DS, especially the singing.
I'm 70 yrs. old so we had to make our own speech and music synthesizers when we were kids. Its good to see younger people interested in older hardware, not because I'm nostalgic but because you are understanding how things actually work.
While this particular variant of the DEC Talk is obsolete there are some PBX's out there still using the stand alone units to this day.
I was thinking the National Weather Service warnings/tests sound 100% DECtalk
That's called ROI. : P
I do remember hearing about preserving Steven Hawking's speech synthesizer, then needed an emulation of a certain obscure CPU. And they needed help a SNES-turned-multi-console emulator called higan. The author that glad his effort to more accurately emulate whichever game it was that used whatever "enhancement chip" which had that CPU embedded inside, could turn into something more significant.
Can you elaborate or post a source or article? This sounds fascinating.
@@daveloomis www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-Silicon-Valley-quest-to-preserve-Stephen-12759775.php Here you go.
@@daveloomis "Steven Hawking's speech synthesizer snes higan"
You're seriously stupid and lazy..
@@MrMiss-cp9bw And you are a prick. Besides everyone gets different results that are tailored to them, so you are stupid.
David Loomis www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-Silicon-Valley-quest-to-preserve-Stephen-12759775.php a pretty good write up on the whole ordeal
YOUR JACKET IS NOW *D R Y*
You need more likes!
WELCOME HOME, JENNIFER.
KRAFTWERK2K6 I forgot about that one!
Eeeeeeeee! Your jacket is now jry
THAT SHORT CIRCUIT FACT BLEW MY MIND AND MAKES SO MUCH SENSE!!!
DECTalk is pretty awesome... it was used as the TTS engine in Moonbase Alpha,, and became the root of many great memes...
"I'm gonna eat a pizza*
*dials number*
*Hello, can i order a pizza?*
*no*
*Why?*
*'Cause you are John Madden*
Dennis Klatt is the first vocaloid
Football
Rip Professor Hawking.
" You have selected Sam as your default computer voice. "
Holly crap. That singing bit would be killer in some new "retro" synthwave stuff. LOL
Plus floppy drives as instruments
I found a song called "Hello World" by Louie Zong that sounds a lot like it uses the DECTalk voice, so there's that. It's a cute song too.
@@BlueMoon1890 Thanks. It was fun.
"Welcome home, Marty... Lord of the Manor... King of the Castle"
Love your videos, keep up the great work!
"Balls and farts and things!" That's gonna be my go-to for testing speech synthesis from now on.
19:02 🎶Daisy, daisy, give me your answer, do...🎶
Hey genius - It's "give me your answer _true._
@@greenbanana311 lol no
Dude, your laugh is amazing. It’s so wholesome 😊 please continue making amazing content like this!
As a swede I must protest
Are you by chance a drunken swede?
Sounds like a drunken Swede? Nah, he's just speaking Danish.
@@FindecanorNotGmail Lol
Lurrrrvvvv this guys voice, kinda calming. Videos are great too, so thanks and greetings from the Isle of Wight, England .
I work at a University and we use the Jaws Program for our visually impaired students when they're taking exams. I set up their exams in Word Documents before they take their exams because the Jaws Program will read out everything--and I mean everything!--on the screen which can be loud and confusing. It's so important for pur students and it's made a huge difference in their college experiences!
9:01 - All I can think of “omg I hope that speaker is magnetically shielded!” As he places it on the disk holder
That Bonzai Buddy popup got me, great, if not odd, episode. Well done Clint.
"Swede with a speech impediment."
Isn't that a Dane? ;-)
(Love you guys.)
It's a Finn! Everybody knows it's a Finn. Except the Finns, who are in denial.
Nah the danes sound like drunk germans trying to speak norwegian
I worked for Digital in Maynard, Mass and this was great watching this. Thank you for your video!! Ken would be proud!
My wife was blind, and had a DECtalk. Hers was an external device that connected to a DB-9 serial port. In 2000, she got one that connected via USB. She also had JAWS for Windows. She used it at home and work. At work, she used earbuds so it wouldn't distract others. It worked great.
LOL, Short Circuit.
I love you man that's the first movie my mind went to.
You're telling me that the DEC Talk is responsible for John MADDEN?
aeiou
FOOTBALL
_BIG AMERICAN TTS_
A meta layer of humor is that TTS is an acronym for “Text-to-Speech”. LOL
Steve Madden
The PC needed a $1200 extension, the Amiga did it out of the box. AmigaOS 2.0 actually had the same voice.
As did Mac OS. In fact, even today Mac OS still offers the classic DECtalk-style voices, in addition to more modern text-to-speed synthesis.
VWestlife What was great about the Amiga version, it was based on the earlier S.A.M. for C64 and Atari (the latter had that iconic voice used in U96’s Techno version of the “Das Boot” theme), so it had a phoneme mode where you could let it speak other languages, albeit with an American accent. I had great fun with it.
I had a hearsay 1000 for commodore 64. And the cool thing about that module was you could train the voice to sound more human by reading text into a built in mic on the cartridge.
Talk about being ahead of their time. I didn't know Hearsay could do that. I assume it has pitch detection and stores that in its memory to use as inflection data.
@@rommix0 I was 9 years old at the time, so I don't remember how it managed the trick, only that the demo software that came with it had an example voice that sounded shockingly realistic for the time, and when we would run the training program, it would show you words and then prompt you to say the word a few times. so it would start to sound more like your voice tone/inflection.
I'm glad you gave a shout-out to short-circuit that is my favorite movie of all time
I'd make a Half-Life 1 joke, but god only knows what those soldiers are saying
Half Life 1 used a hand-programmed speech system with prerecorded phrases and programmed sentences based on environmental variables. Not even close to TTS.
@@BarnacleButtock I'm not claiming that.
I know what they're saying...
"GRENADE!!!"
Faire in thehole
@@BarnacleButtock So you're saying that they turned text into speech? Yeah, man that's totally different than TTS... You're so smart.
Jobel is a speech syntesizer CONFIRMED D:
Ye olde BBQ shoe boy
Mfw Jobel could be literally anyone but we all know exactly which.
@@bs_blackscout joel gets angrier every day.
Weather band radio stations used DECtalk for many years.
My grandfather had a Commodore C-64 back in the 80s when I was a kid. He bought a Currah Speech-64 speech synthesizer add on cartridge for it. We had fun writting speech programs to use with it. I wrote some programs that were in a question and answer type format. The program would have the computer ask a question using the speech cartridge voice and wait for an answer to be typed in before moving on to the next question. It was pretty fun playing around with the speech cartridge. The quality of the speech output sounded just like the one you were using in the video. And it also sounded like Stephen Hawking too. LOL!!! The cartridge was about the same size as an Atari cartridge and plugged in the rear cartridge expansion slot on the back. It also had a short cable connected to it with DIN plug that also plugged in to a DIN port on the back of the computer.
Modern versions of this exist, though the software on the chip is not 4.2.C. Look at the DECTALK USB from Access Solutions. I've got one and it's pretty cool. Have been a big DEC fan for a long time and it was extra cool to get something I could use with a modern system. Also, had no idea the Archive had an emulator of this.
Great vid.
[:nh]I'm gonna eat a pizza. [:dial67589340] Hi, can i order a pizza? [:nv]no! [:nh]why? [:nv] cuz you are john madden![:np]
Moonbase Alpha.
Mohn Jadden
AEIOU
mamma mia, pappa pia
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
Wel-come home, Mar-ty. Lord of the Ma-nor... King of the Cast-le...
I love the speech synthesis in the song Keep Talking by Pink Floyd
Your posture and the LGR logo in the top right at the beginning just makes you look like a geeky news anchor
The original Amiga, later called the "A1000", could do this the day of its launch, July 23, 1985 at the Lincoln Center, NYC. Admittedly, its voice was more "robotic", but this was accomplished without any specialized speech synthesis hardware. There's a video recording of that presentation on YT, also featuring Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry. Check it out.
Really nobody is gonna talk about this mans supersonic type-speed?
Not that impressive 😉
10:08 Look at the screen - It's edited 😂
I know
R.I.P Stephen Hawking
@@bmhater1283 U
N
@@kbhasi saved it. Good man.
Rest in piss
I was never a big fan of Steve. He was an extreme pessimist that claimed all roads lead to doom. He was too smart for his own good.
Now you can spam wwwwwwwwwwwwww at relatives irl. Gg
I lilke your woodgrain PC with the green elements and buttons. It's sooo relaxing to look at it.
And also projects reliability.
Nice to be reminded of the need and usefulness of this piece of hardware. A lot of people were very grateful for this.
Reminds me of the Say program on the Amiga 500.
Greetings and welcome to an LGR, PC Speech Synthesizer thing.
Fitter
Happier
More productive
Regular exercise at the gym
Three days a week
a pig
in a cage
on antibiotics
came looking for this comment :)
@@lemonworm same here! :)
Hay this is great, it takes me back I remember that. When I was a kid about seven or eight years old I went to a school called Pembroke meadows elementary, now it’s just called Pembroke Elementary. I saw the first talking computer by Apple there, WTKR channel 3 news came to our school and reported on it. We got to see news anchor Paula Miller, our class was on the 6 o’clock news, I was in a special Ed class I’m totally blind so those talking computers were a big help to us.
I have a good friend/computer customer who is blind, and for a very long time, he used a 486 DOS computer with JAWS and the DECTalk PC board and another one later on, and just keeping his machine up and running was quite the chore at the time, finding parts to keep him up and running. Later on, we would try out tons of other software/hardware combinations from a modern PC with FreeDOS and JAWS and parallel/serial port synthesizer but he could never quite get into the same groove with all the config files he had and keyboard shortcuts and telnetting into his email and basic web browsing. He always said that there was some subtle differences with MS-DOS 5 or 6 and FreeDOS so that he didn't get the same feedback from his set up. The speed at which he could operate that old box though with all his shortcuts, blips, audio sound cues and clips, dial up sounds, and super fast JAWS speech always blew my mind.
Years later, I finally converted him over to Linux with speech dispatcher and Orca so he could get away from using a dial up modem and difficult to repair hardware and getting him using SSH over Telnet, even navigating a graphical interface and 'watching' TH-cam, etc. It was certainly an enlightening experience working with him and helping him out, learning how a blind person uses a computer and essentially learning how to use one myself in many ways, but I always made it a point to bring my own monitor when he needed help that I couldn't quite figure out without somebody with eyes on it. It was tons of trial and error, for sure.
Also, if you want JAWS to shut up, I think you hit the Windows key, not quite sure on that. I know there is a key for it to shut up or skip to the next thing. My friend had the speech set up SO FAST that while I couldn't understand what it was saying, he could. It was his version of speed reading.
Your oil level is critical, damage may occur. Your lights are on. Your windshield washer, is low. Your coolant temperature, is Normal
"A door is ajar." *closes door* "Thank you."
@@jst7714 😂😂
What car was this?
@@gregorymalchuk272 Chrysler cars, and some GM cars had this back in the day.
I'm pretty sure Radiohead used this device on the OK Computer album
Definitely the the voice on the track "Fitter Happier".
_I may be paranoid, but not an android_
Dennis Klatt sounds like that voice from the Emergency Alert System.
Does it sound like the voice of CVS Pharmacy, the Social Security Administration and Apple? Or does it sound more computerized? If the former, here's a fun fact: That voice you hear isn't text-to-speech, it's a voice actor named Tom Glynn. If the latter, it IS a text to speech system that was modeled after Tom Glynn, who just *sounds* like a computer... ;)
I worked in the late 1990s with a guy who was blind. He had a speech synthesizer (not sure which one) hooked up to his Unix workstation. Everything on the screen would be read out loud. But he had it speaking so fast that I had no idea what it was saying. It was cool because it allowed him to work as a software engineer.
Watching this in January 2020, and I just noticed Outpost 2 on the lower right (my right) shelf behind you. I loved that game as a kid, and the included novelisation of the game's story was probably what got me into reading books in the first place. Here's hoping for a video on Outpost 2 some day. :)
"A cross between a Swede, and an Indian" ... "A drunken Swede." "A Swede with a speech impediment" ...all the Descriptions of the Voice are just Describing a Dane....
Well.... Being a Dane it's hard to deny those facts... 😆
shut up you idiot
Surely if they're drunk they are probably Norwegian. 🤣
For those that care. Parallax is producing the Emic 2 speech synthesizer, which uses Epson’s DECtalk on a chip.
so am i the only one who upon hearing the voice think Moonbase alpha *looks through comments* ah ok so im not the only one. great vid LGR
CLINT! You`re so soothing to watch and listen to. Of course the topics are close to the heart also, as growing up with C64, Amiga 500 and old PC-games. :D Really appreciate the effort, please keep on going, sir!
I've been playing videos from your channel for about a week now and I reallye njoy them, especially the Oddware instalments. But this one finally prompted me to comment. You see, I am accessing youtube at the moment using Chrome and jAWS 2018 (already a few years out of date). I never had any Dectalk hardware, but I noticed this synth back in the 80s when I was growing up -- the Mississauga Tranist bus telephone numbers would read out the schedule using the Paul voice. Later on at libraries I saw the big Kurzweil Reading Machines of various kinds -- they were big standalone devices that included scanner, optical character recognition and voice output. IN the late 90s they had a software version, and finally in 1999 I got the programme for Windows 98, which included Dectalk software. The voices, unlike many speech synthesisers of the 1980s, still kind of stand up today as being pretty good! They do have a pretty unique expressive quality.