DigiTalker is a voice synthesis system National Semiconductor came out with in the late 70's as a solution to encorpirate clear speech into embedded appliances. The standard vocabulary kit came with 144 pre-loaded words that can be sequenced and arranged to make basic sentences. And, it sounds really good even by today's standards, but for one reason or another the product never really took off and National discontinued the DigiTalker line somewhere around 1990.

We picked up this chipset back in the early 90's for about $25 from Jameco Electronics. And, one of our long-term goals has been to make this chipset easily accessible to modern-day microcontrollers

We've had this chipset breadboarded for years and finally decided to make it into a professional product... and here it is!

The board uses a mix of direct control lines and an I²C interface to access the DigiTalker's various address and control lines. A total of 5 Arduino I/O lines are required to operate the DigiTalker. On-board amplifier with adjustable volume and pitch filter are included. The board is designed to run off of a +9DVC power supply.

"This is DigiTalker. One. Two. Three..."