Low Cost Voice Response Systems Based on Speech Synthesis

A recent advance in speech synthesis technology is the integration of a complete speech synthesizer onto a single integrated circuit. This chip is the basis for several low cost “talking” consumer products. Speech is synthesized from stored digital information extracted from actual speech signals. Memory requirements are approximately 1200 bits per second or 800 bits per word. This development offers the potential for including voice response into a wide variety of applications at a very low cost.