Look Ma, I'm Talking

Little chips learn to speak

"You are exceeding the 55 m.p.h. speed limit," intones the engine. "Time to fill 'er up," announces the gas tank. It sounds like something out of Looney Tunes, but a talking Ford may well be in the future, not to mention babbling Buicks and loquacious Lincolns. Ford and General Motors are tinkering with computerized voice synthesizers that in several years could replace the dashboard gauges with oral announcements about the condition of the car. Officials of both companies stress that audible autos are still a long way off, but, says a GM spokesman, "We might have something to show you in a couple of years."

The technology for talking cars comes off the Dallas drawing boards of Texas Instruments Inc., which has come up with a computer chip, costing less than $5 to manufacture, that synthesizes the human voice. So far, TI has used the chip only in its $60 talking learning aid for children, called Speak & Spell; the company has been marketing it with considerable success since last September. The red and yellow plastic device asks wide-eyed kids and fascinated adults to spell words as easy as was or as difficult as quotient by punching out the letters on a keyboard. It then responds, "That is correct," or "That is incorrect," and gives the bad speller two more chances before it spells the word itself and goes on to the next word. The chip has a vocabulary of 250 words, and another chip called Vowel Power can add 150 more. The voice is a male monotone patterned after the Midwestern accent of a Dallas radio announcer. Says a TI public relations man: "We were looking for standard American speech--not good English, just very American."

Speech patterns, like other sound waves, can be charted by assigning a numerical value to each point on the wave. These numbers are then run through a computer in sequence, and the numerical input is converted into sound by electrical impulses. The tremendous increase in computer memory power during the past decade has enabled technicians to translate such variables as pitch and loudness into numerical values to reproduce a sound exactly.

Three years ago, Telesensory Systems Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., came out with its Speech Plus talking calculator, which sounds out the numbers and the functions that are punched in. Price: $395. Next year Telesensory hopes to produce a computer for the blind that will scan a printed page and turn it into speech.

TI is so secretive about the way Speak & Spell works that competitors are buying the toy just to smash it and recover the chip. The Texas company has managed to put a fairly large vocabulary onto a computer chip at low cost. With that, synthetic speech becomes possible in many consumer products. Washing machines could gurgle when the suds get too high, and the refrigerator could snarl at the midnight raider. But what, the best brains in Detroit are wondering, will happen when a driver's eight-track quadraphonic recording of Disco Queen Donna Summer is interrupted by a disembodied voice warning that the car, or perhaps the listener, is overheating?

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