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With several of Quicksilva's programs now using synthesised speech, Speakeasy seems a natural addition to their software catalogue for those who wish to add speech to their own Basic or machine-code programs.

The program is menudriven and the user is given six options enabling him to record, playback, save and edit speech or music. The speech or music is entered into the computer's memory by playing it through the Spectrum's ear socket with the program in record mode.

Recording takes a minute or two, although when played back, it lasts only about ten seconds since a large amount of memory is required to store the digitised sound.

Once loaded, the sound can be edited by changing the start and length pointers which control which part is played using the playback option. Once you are satisfied with the effect, you can then save the passage to tape.

The saved passage loaded at any time using the LOAD ....

CODE instruction and then played back using a USR xxxx~ caU, where xxxxx is the start address of the sound. This address is also stored in the filename of the passage as 'SPxxxxx'.

The quality of the sound is not excellent, but it is intelligible enough for most purposes. The program itself is easy to use, although the instructions given within the program are rather confusing and long-winded. But this does not affect the usability of a very clever and useful program.

I.O.