VIDEO: Speak & Spell (1978)

The distinctive accent of the Texas Instruments Speak & Spell is a Gen X nostalgia trigger. Did you know it’s based on a real person’s voice? The technology of LPC encoding — an early lossy audio codec — would later see use in pinball and arcade games like Star Wars and Gauntlet.

Can’t get enough of that Speak & Spell voice? We have a TMS5100 audio chip emulator working on our Trellis M4 board.