Q. I have decided to buy a new computer but I need some advice. I presently own a Vic 20 so the obvious answer would be the C64, or possibly the Electron.

I am particularly interested in speech synthesis and speech recognition.

T. Dargie
Penarth, S. Glamorgan

A. You don't say nearly enough about what you use your computer for, or how experienced you are. If you are programming in machine code, for instance, you'll probably want to stay with 6502 processors - and that rules out Spectrum, Amstrad and Memotech, for example.

The Electron is remarkably ill-equipped for expansion, so that must be a factor in your decision. On the question of speech synthesis, virtually all of the home computers - your Vic included - now have speech synthesisers available, so there's little to choose there.

Finally, speech recognition is fairly unbroken ground for personal computers but your minimum requirements will be analogue to digital conversion and pretty hefty memory. The BBC Micro scores well on the former, not so well on the latter. With the C64 the opposite is true. If you're serious about speech recognition you're facing some electronics and machine code - high level languages are much too slow.