Microcontroller Speech Synthesis Lets Your Project Be Heard

[Aditya] had a project that called for spoken output. He admits that he could have built a PC-based solution, but he found that adding speech by using a microcontroller was not only a cheap and portable alternative, it was also a fun and easy build.

His design uses an ATMega128. Many microcontrollers would work, but his major requirements were PWM generation and plenty of memory to store the file(s). The output is cleaned up in a simple low pass filter before going to the 8Ω speaker.

[Aditya] lays his tracks in WAV format and then compresses it to 8-bit/8kHz. He found a C++ function that converts the track data into a huge arrays and then digitizes it. He uses two timers, one to generate the waveform and second one to time the square wave. [Aditya] has a zip of samples available on his site that will speak the digits 0-9.

16 thoughts on “Microcontroller Speech Synthesis Lets Your Project Be Heard

      1. In all fairness, the subject is a bit misleading. Not that it’s a bad project, but it’s more an addressable wav player than a speech synthesizer in the manner most people understand it to be. When you title a project as ‘Microcontroller Speech Synthesis’ the most common inference is a TTS engine in software, which is something difficult to implement, or at least some chip based TTS solution.

  1. “He found a C++ function that converts the track data into a huge arrays and then digitizes it.”

    And all these years I thought “digitize” means converting something analog to a digital representation. The data is already digitized when it is inside a huge array. He might be *compressing* or *processing*, but certainly not *digitizing*.

    1. I pick on the person that writes the summary just as I would pick on technical aspect of a “hack” and for that I rarely pick on grammar.

      For a person that is *paid* to write summaries for hack, fact checking, knowledge of terms and how clearly they explain things are *important* part of being a professional. For that, me picking on them hopefully would improve the quality of summaries over time.

      You are picking on my for entirely different reasons.

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