Well, the Accent uses the same Artic, at one point called "SSI"" 263 speech chip, which Artic used on the 200, 215, series and later in their Transport TransType and Ergo/Braille Desk products. By the way, that same Artic 263 chip is in the Braille'n Speak and other Blazie products. The 263 chip was a lineal descendant of the Votrax line of synthesizers, because most of the Artic crew left Votrax (Federal Screw Works) as a team. Blazie and NFB didn't want to buy the chip when rights of ownership reverted back to Artic, after SSI had sold enough of the chips, which was part of the deal for manufacture of the Artic designed unit. Artic really made it sing with their speech algorithms "vest" and "advest" which were part of their screen reading packages, although they could've and should've been incorporated into ROM. Artic's whole problem was that Tim Gargliano (spelling?) their programmer was paranoid and burned out because people would buy their boards and swipe their Sonix code, in the days before they started serializing their boards with software. Tim wanted the whole ball of wax and didn't want anyone like Ron Claton Hutchinson (remember him) selling his screen reader and using any of the Artic Team's work. Even back then, we had that school of thought, "It's only good if a blind man wrote the code" silliness, and Artic had the courage to say "nuts!". Those phonemic synthesizers were wonderful in a lot of ways today's neophytes just don't have a clue about... Nick On Mon, 9 Oct 2006 20:35:14 -0700, Tyler Spivey wrote: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Just out of curiosity, what have any of you used for ancient synths? I'm not talking the well-known ones such as accent/artic, I'm talking something like Votrax anything, Covox, or any ones that are strange. It'd be cool to get one of those, but they're probably all gone to history. What brought this up? Some weird speech package called Enable that supported some of those which appears to be from the 80's. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQFFKxTpTsjaYASMWKQRApO9AJ408Q8fHQEXuKxbMOxpyk7Y6dGmWQCfUUlf TMYOSh5yp/aPf0TI81zyhO8= =HRkr -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Speakup mailing list Speakup at braille.uwo.ca http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
