“Back in the 1980s, the now-defunct Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sold a hardware speech synthesizer based on Dennis Klatts research at MIT. These DECTalk boxes were compact and robust, and despite not having the greatest speech quality gave valuable speech, telephone and reading accessibility to many people. Stephen Hawkings distinctive voice is from a pre-DEC version of the MIT hardware. DEC is long gone, and the licensing of DECTalk has wandered off into mostly software. Much to the annoyance of those in earshot, Ive always enjoyed dabbling in speech synthesis. DECTalk hardware remains expensive, partly because of demand from electronic music producers (its vocoder-like burr is on countless tracks), but also because there are still many people who rely on it for daily life. I couldnt justify buying a real DECTalk, but I found this: the Parallax Emic 2 Text-to-Speech Module. For about $80, this stamp-sized board brings a hardware DECTalk implementation to embedded projects. The Emic 2 is really marketed to microcontroller hobbyists: Make Your Arduino Speak! sorta thing. But I wanted to make a DECTalk-ish hardware box, with serial input, a speaker, and switchable headphone/line jack. [t?k b?ks] (a fair approximation of how I pronounce Talk Box) is the result.”