Despite its early promise, speech synthesis still seems often to be in its infancy on the Beeb. Now, with the advent of the latest Speech ROM from Computer Concepts, the infant is beginning to talk intelligibly. Alan Webster answers back.

To be quite honest, I had never been very impressed with 'computer speech', until I heard the Acorn speech PHROM, with good old Kenneth Kendall muttering his cultured tones at me. That was around two years ago now, and at that point I thought that Acorn were on to a winner. Unfortunately, nothing significant has really happened since then, other than a few 'Speech ROMs' which have claimed much, but often turned out to do little more than help Doctor Who understand the Daleks!

To use this new speech ROM on the Beeb, you need the Texas Instruments TMS5220 speech synthesis chip as well, to plug into socket IC99. The TMS5220 is not included in the package, so if you haven't got Acorn's original speech system (which contained the TMS5220) then you will need to buy one of these at an extra cost of about £10.00.

The speech ROM is activated by first plugging it into one of the sideways ROM sockets, and then typing the command *SPON to initialise it. Once this has been done, you must press the Break key to allow the machine to reserve two pages of memory for the speech ROM's workspace.

There are four commands to control the speech from your Beeb. The *UTTER command allows the user to specify one of 24 tones in which the speech is to be heard, and the phonemes which are to be pronounced. The *SING command must be followed by a pitch (from A-G and from one of three octaves), and the note length.

*VOICE is used to set the overall pitch of the speech, with five settings from High to Low. *SYNC allows synchronization between speech and Basic program.

The vocabulary contains 20 vowel sounds and 24 consonant sounds, which when combined can make up a whole word or even sentences. As an example, consider how to make the Beeb pronounce the phrase 'one two three'. You would have to type:

*UTTER<1> W +u N @ T +00 @ TH R +E

I found it quite easy to build up phrases, the most difficult part being in getting the intonation and stresses right. One small omission was that the package contains no phoneme editor, to allow you to create your own sounds.

Editing long sentences can prove tedious and difficult, so Computer Concepts provide, in the manual, a short utility to run in Wordwise-Plus that makes life a lot easier.

The manual supplied with the ROM is certainly comprehensive and is laid out simply and clearly. It starts off by showing how to initialise the ROM and gives a few well chosen examples to begin with. The quality of speech is quite good, but often only if you know what the processor is going to say! We tested out some of the phrases given in the manual on various members of staff at Beebug. Obvious phrases like 'BBC Microcomputer' were recognised, but more difficult ones like 'hot summer', which sounded as though summer had been spelt 'sunger', were often incomprehensible.

Overall, the price seems high for what can be achieved. The results are not helped either by the relatively poor quality of the Beeb's internal speaker. However, speech synthesis seems to be catching on, and this is certainly the most comprehensive and best 'toolkit' for speech available at the moment.