Using a SpeakJet with MAVRIC or MAVRIC-II Mega128 Board (Interactive Interface)

The Magnevation SpeakJet is a voice synthesizer and complex sound synthesis chip that accepts serial input in the form of 8-bit phoneme and sound effect codes and coverts those to synthesized sounds. The SpeakJet can be used to give your project speech and sound effect capability very easily.

This program provides an interactive interface for exploring the capabilities of the SpeakJet chip. Sounds can be specified by using the raw code or the mneumonic. Thanks to the large FLASH memory of the MAVRIC / MAVRIC-II boards, it was no problem to incorporate the entire phoneme mneumonic text as well as their desicriptions into this program. Thus, one can specify the phoneme mneumonics by name for playback, as well as list out all the phonemes with descriptions for easy reference while experimenting. This is easier than having to frequently refer to the phoneme table in order to look up the raw numeric codes. For example, to say "ready", one can issue:

     >>> rr eh de iy

Instead of the raw codes:

     >>> 148 131 174 128 

While each of the above sequences are equivalent, the former is easier for humans to use. This program accepts both and is useful for exploring the capabilities of the SpeakJet sound synthesis chip.

Here is some sample speech output produced by the sample program's startup message.