VoiceBox

Full Instructions from PDF Manual Scan at www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk

Blue Alpha Electronics
Ynysforgan Farm, Morriston, Swansea SA6 60L
Tel : (0792) 310865

Thank you for buying 'The VoiceBox' for your SAM Coupe. We hope that you are pleased with your purchase and that you will continue to support us in supporting your home computer. Please do not forget to send us your guarantee card as soon as possible.

Introduction.
The VoiceBox is an allophone based speech synthesizer It comes complete with its own driver software which enables you to type in English text, which is converted to speech. A written description of software to drive the VoiceBox from your own BASIC or machine code programs is given in this document.

What you should have.
This manual, a guarantee card, a white plastic box with a connecter on one side, and a disk (or tape).

Connecting to the Coupe.
Switch your computer OFF at the mains. Never connect or disconnect any interface to your computer with the power on, as this could damage your interface and/or your computer. Plug the VoiceBox into the Expansion Euroconnecter (see your Coupe User Guide) at the rear of your machine (If you have any other interfaces connected to the Euroconnecter, you will have to disconnect them). Now switch on your Coupe. You should get the normal start-up message.

Hearing your Coupe speak.
Turn the volume up on your TV, monitor or stereo. If you have a tape based system, press F7 and start the tape deck. If you have a disk based system, boot the system from one of your own, bootable disks, and then insert the VoiceBox disk in the. left hand drive and press F9.  A demonstration of the Coupe speaking should now be loading. It autoruns when loaded. The text to speech converter will then load automatically.

You may now type English text and upon pressing RETURN, the computer will convert the English to a phonetic representation of the speech, and then say the speech. You may vary the speed by pressing 1 to 5 followed by RETURN at the "Enter your text :" prompt. The program may be exited by typing 'STOP.' (without the quotes). Quite often the correct speech will be obtained by an irregular spelling of the words.  If you can not hear the speech by following the above procedure, please check that you have followed the above instructions exactly, and if it still does not appear to work, please ring us on the above number.

Theory of operation.
It is important to understand the operation of the VoiceBox before attempting to drive it from within your own programs. The VoiceBox can be interrogated as to whether it is connected to the computer. If it is connected, it can be sent a code corresponding to an allophone, and then polled to see if it has finished saying the current allophone, and then sent the next allophone. (An allophone is a basic building block of speech, from which any word can be constructed.) An example of a BASIC subroutine to accomplish this is given in the next section. It should be noted that the letters which make up an English word are not necessarily the same as those suitable to be sent to the VoiceBox

Using the VoiceBox from your own programs.
The VoiceBox appears to the computer as a single IO mapped port, at the IO address FF7F Hex, or 65407 Decimal. The input port responds with the VoiceBox signature of 24 on its uppermost 7 bits, and the Least Significant Bit (LSB) is the BUSY status of the VoiceBox. The VoiceBox must be sent a silence code ( 0 ) [EDIT: Actually a 10ms pause] at the end of each word, or the last allophone will be repeated indefinitely.

For full handshaking operation, the VoiceBox should be driven as shown in the following BASIC subroutine:

1. Poll port 65407.       1000 LET inport = IN 65107
2. Is the VoiceBox        1010 LET sig = inport BAND 254
   connected ?            1020 IF sig <> 24 THEN stop
3. Is It still speaking?  1030 LET busy =IN 65407 BAND 1
                          1040 IF busy =1 THEN GOTO 1030
4. Output the allophone.  1050 OUT 65407,allophone
                          1060 RETURN

Where : allophone, busy, sig and inport are variable names.

This subroutine should be called for each allophone In the speech to be said. Machine Code programmers should easily be able to convert the above into the corresponding Z80 mnemonics.

The allophones thus far referred to may be found in the final section of this manual. Each letter is followed by the allophone occurrence In an example word, followed by the corresponding code.