www.smart-tactics.com

It was so easy to write that - but back then the concept of a megabyte was mind blowing and no-one I knew had ever heard of digital recording.

Speak & Spell only had a 16k ROM to store the speech. 16k was massive in those days and it was inconceivable to add more without a huge price rise. So we had to get a few megabytes into 16k. Enter the genius of Larry Brantingham who, along with a couple of colleages, had patented the technology in TI's speech chips.

The technology called LPC (Linear Predictive Coding) took samples of the sound and invented (predicted) the sounds that had happened in between the samples. This is the same way all digital sound systems work today. CDs use samples taken every 44,000th of a second but in those days the sample rate was much slower at 10th of a second - therefore the amount of 'prediction' was higher. In short the sounds went off to be processed and compressed and came back - as garbage. Not only that it was about 24k of garbage - so it had to be shrunk even further.

The only way rescue the sounds and shrink it further was manually. What do I mean? Well each 10th of a second of the sound had a single line of code to describe it, as I recall there were 20 numbers on each line. From left to right these numbers described the position of parts of the mouth of a someone saying that tiny 1/10 second sound. Therefore a "P" would have lower numbers in the left hand columns for the first few lines to describe the lips being together. But the rest of the colums would have to be right to get the desired effect as they described the position of tongue, shape of mouth etc.

This detailed, line by line, 1/10 of a second editing had to be done on every single word to make the product work and sound right. It was a very specialist job, and only two people in the world where trained for it, but neither were used to English speech. It would have been fruitless for them to do the work as we'd just end up with another US sounding product. There had never been an English digital speech product made by anyone, this was going to be a world first.

It was my project, and time was moving on. So there was no other option, I had to give up marketing for 3 months and do it myself. I taught myself the rules and locked myself in an anachoic chamber in Antibes for 3 months and get the product ready. Because if this I cannot bear to listen the product even now. I remember the word 'butcher' took 3 days - I still don't know if it sounds right.

I delivered the product, andI also helped complete the French, German and Italian versions of Speak & Spell too. They offered me a move to Dallas but I demurred. I had had enough of this - I wanted to get back to marketing.

It was quite a first 6 months at TI!