Voice Recognition Hardware/Software?

[aminerva]

I remember when I was a kid and used to hang around the local software store roaming the atari 8 bit isle, there was a voice recognition headset available. It came with blackjack, and you programmed your voice by saying "hit me" (no jokes please) 10 or so times until it knew your voice, then onto the next command.

 

I think this was going to be used for other games (first person space shooters?) so you could fire guns with joystick button but use voice commands for other weapons. That could be me remembering my wishful thinking youth, however.

 

Anyway just curious if anyone ever actually bought one of these or used it? Was there more software available than just the black jack?

 

Quick internet search brought up this page (scroll down to the Covox Voice Master) http://www.atarimagazines.com/v6n9/ShoppersGuide.html which is probably what I'm remembering. Presumably someone here at atariage must have one.

 

This was mentioned in a previous topic here http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.p...6&view=previous

 

Thanks

 

Tony

[Curt Vendel]

For the year they were released and the available technology at the time they weren't bad at all, I have a Covox Voice Master and the Covox VM Jr which is certainly improved hardware. The voice control wasn't all that bad and it came with some good software that you could use to incorporate into programs, plus the voice digitization was pretty damned cool. SAM (Screen Actuated Mouth) was the best Voice Synthesiser software on the 8bits. I remember my uncle coming over our house one night and hearing the computer making words came into my room and starting typing every curse in the book and laughing non-stop hearing the computer curse back at him, needless to say, my mother wasn't too pleased with his sense of humor

 

Analog did an article on building a voice box that connected to ports 1 & 2 on any Atari and used an off the shelf Radio Shack speech chip to build a speech synthesiser, it was a nice little project.

 

The Voice Box was another device and similar to the above hardware hack, this was a commercial box that plugged into the SIO bus.

 

Atari eventually incorporated voice synthesis into its 1400XL and 1450XLD computers and the Atari Telecommunicator and the Atari Answering Machine programs are the only packages that take advantage of the built in features (the TONG 1450XLD speech chip was a later, and surprisingly, incompatible chip so the 1400XL software didn't work on it, only the older 83' shortboard 1450XL).

 

 

Curt

[DanBoris]

Analog did an article on building a voice box that connected to ports 1 & 2 on any Atari and used an off the shelf Radio Shack speech chip to build a speech synthesiser, it was a nice little project.

 

 

Curt

 

I actually built one of these back in the day, worked pretty good. I think I still have it around somewhere.

 

Dan

[aminerva]

Thanks very much for the responses, maybe I'll come across one of these items some day.

 

I appreciate the info

 

Tony