Retro | Speak & Spell Electronic Game | Classic Retro Interactive Toy, Educational Learning System For Boys & Girls Ages 4+ | Basic Fun 09624

Product Information

Race – A Super Speak & Spell game in which fast recall, accurate spelling, and touch-typing skills are tested with time limits. [27] Initially, there were only a very few people involved. At the initial meeting in November, Paul Breedlove came over to the research Labs with Gene Frantz and Larry Brantingham from the Consumer Products Group. The result of that meeting was that I was to propose a technique for generating the speech in the product. The challenge was that it had to be solid state (no pull strings!), cheap (meaning it used a low cost semiconductor technology), and the speech had to be good enough so that the user could understand the word out of context — a little bit harder than using a word in a sentence. Larry was a circuit designer and was tasked to determine if what I came up with could be implemented in an integrated circuit. Larry and I spent time together discussing various strategies, and Gene Frantz, who eventually became the project manager, kept the overall design moving forward. Woerner, Joerg. Texas Instruments Touch & Talkies "Shuttle Buddies". Datamath Calculator Museum. 5 December 2001. a b Woerner, Joerg. Texas Instruments Ready..Set...Read!. Datamath Calculator Museum. 15 December 2001.

It functioned as a handheld drill-and-practice aid for basic math, and was designed to resemble a wise and friendly owl. The Little Professor suggested problems to students and rewarded them with a message on its display when they gave the correct answer. The video display employed in the Speak & Spell was a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) that was only capable of displaying 8 text characters at a time. The later Super Speak & Spell model had a slimmer case and an LCD screen which could display 16 characters.Woody: "Tuesday night's plastic corrosion awareness meeting was, I think, a big success. And we wanna thank Mr. Spell for putting that on for us. Thank you, Mr. Spell." A number of TI's other game [85] [86] lines produced during the period when it was producing Speak & Spell games bore similar logically conjunctive titles and employed similar technology although they did not involve the use of Solid State Speech technology. Such games included:

The Speak & Spell was one of a trio of talking educational toys released by Texas Instruments that later included Speak & Read and Speak & Math (both launched in 1980).

Touch & Discover School Edition – The next generation of the Touch & Discover console, the Touch & Discover School Edition is aimed at a slightly older audience. [107] Woerner, Joerg. Texas Instruments Speak & Spell (English Voice Type 1). Datamath Calculator Museum. 14 July 2005.

Woerner, Joerg. Texas Instruments La Super Dictée Magique. Datamath Calculator Museum. 16 March 2004 That’s noteworthy, because I would argue that the Speak & Spell has profoundly shaped how we think about electronic educational devices – what we expect these devices to do. Mobile Computing and Ed-Tech: From Calculators to the Little Professor The Speak & Spell was not the first talking toy. But it was, as Texas Instruments boasted in its CES press release, the first with “no moving parts.” Other toys, such as Mattel’s Chatty Cathy, used pre-recorded voices on phonograph or tape, typically triggered by a pull-string or similar mechanism. These broke easily, as any parent would tell you. So “no moving parts” was a selling point for durability.The February 1983 issue of Computers & Electronics contained instructions for interfacing a Speak & Spell with a Sinclair ZX-80 a Sinclair ZX-81, or a Timex 1000. [48]