The Dectalk External is a rather old synthesizer. It is a huge box with a rocker switch on the front. When it is powered up, a fan comes on, then it makes touch-tone noises. Finally, it says something like "Dectalk version 2.8 is running." I don't remember the version number, but it's something like that. I haven't ran across one of those in years. The speech sounds somewhat different from modern Dectalk synthesizers. It's also extremely sluggish, taking several seconds to respond to a flush command. The bottom line is that very few people probably have that old beast and yours is likely a Dectalk Express. There were a few other external Dectalk models, but I don't think they ever saw much circulation.
