- Speak & Read
Speak & Read was an electronic
learning aid made in1980 , byTexas Instruments . Speak and Read was part of a family of learningtoy s aimed at different subjects, i.e. "Speak and Math " and "Speak and Spell".Speak & Read was designed to help children from ages 4 to 8 develop and improve their reading comprehension and vocabulary. [http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/texas/ref433.htm] Speak & Read came with a companion booklet for use with the various skill activity modes included in the unit. The learning toy had a vocabulary of 250 words. [http://www.datamath.org/Speech/SpeaknRead.htm]
Electronics
The display was a
vacuum fluorescent display (VFD). Speak & Read units utilized a membrane keyboard for input. The Speak & Read used a single-chip voice synthesizer, the TITMS5110 , that was also used in the Speak & Spell. The TMS5110 utilized a 10th-orderlinear predictive coding (LPC) model and the electronicDSP logic. [History Channel,Modern Marvels:"70s Tech", 2007, aired 6:00-7:00pm MST] .Phoneme data was stored on a pair of 128 Kbit metal gate PMOS ROMs. 128 Kbit was a very large capacity ROM in the early 1980s. Additional memory modules could be plugged into a slot in the battery compartment and selected via a button on the keyboard. A later model, the Super Speak & Read, had a much slimmer case and an LCD screen rather than a VFD screen.The unit could use either 4 "C" batteries or 6 volt DC power adapter with positive tip polarity.
Games included
Speak & Read had five built-in learning games: Word Zapper, Word Maker, Read It, Picture Read, Letter Stumper, and Hear It. Picture Read required looking up pictures in the supplementary booklet that came with the unit. Eight expansion modules were known to have been made for the Speak & Read by 1986.
A picture of the Speak & Read can be found here: [http://www.datamath.org/Speech/Images/SpeaknRead.jpg]
External links
* [http://www.datamath.org/Speech/SpeaknRead.htm Datamath - Speak & Read information page]
* [http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/texas/ref433.htm The Chip Collection at the Smithsonian - TI Speak & Read Learning Aid]
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