Single-Chip Turns Text Into Speech

Along with letting you listen to text messages while you're driving, turning text into speech (and vice versa) has other more altruistic applications like increasing access to computers for the blind and deaf. That happy side effect alone can make you feel good about being able to listen to text messages instead of reading them. Winbond Electronics has been busy working on text-to-speech capabilities and just told us about the WTS701, a single chip IC that provides the conversion. The IC uses a concatenation algorithm combined with Winbond's Multi-Level Storage (MLS) technology, which the company says reduces computing and memory resources so that TTS can be accomplished without using microprocessors, PCs or computers. The chip is capable of supporting a number of languages, but right now, it's set up for U.S. English and Mandarin. The WTS701 is available for sampling now and is priced at under $10 in volume quantities, which are expected to be available in Q1 2002. The WTS701 accepts ASCII (Unicode for Mandarin language) input via a serial SPI port and converts it to spoken audio via an analog output or digital CODEC output. The WTS701 is also supposed to create more natural human sounding prose by converting text to speech using recorded human speech samples. The chip contains two memory arrays: one for the acoustic library and one for the processor program, an A/D converter for sending audio data over an audio PCM bus, and speaker driver circuitry for analog outputs.