Speech is complex in software. Your Alexa or Google Home has to utilize thousands of remote servers with giant cloud infrastructure to be able to parse and respond to our requests, and that kind of backend tends to be out of budget for most of my own projects. However, we’ve had speech synthesis for decades now. Do you remember the Speak and Spell toy from the 70s? It had a Texas Instruments TMS5100 LCP (Linear Predictive Coding) chip inside, utilizing some shift registers and noise generators to turn single letters into spoken words. While it may be difficult to get your hands on these heirlooms nowadays to see the effect yourself, the Arduino Talkie Speech Amplifier Shield lets you use that same nostalgic effects through open-source libraries on any ESP32 board.
This shield was developed to sit right on top of the ESP32 TinyPICO, though with some clever wiring it can work with any ESP32 board! The shield features Texas Instrument’s LM4875 chip, meaning you’ve got a built-in DAC amplifier that can feed right into any 8W speaker you connect via the screw terminals. And to unlock the full potential of this shield, the open-source Arduino Talkie library is available to generate a similar effect as the original TMS5100 chip. With the pages of documentation on the library repo and the seller’s board documentation page, getting started is a breeze!
This beautifully-documented board comes from DebinixTeam, based in Stockholm, Sweden. And if you’ve got a couple of different versions of ESP32 development boards you’d like to try this shield with, they also have an ESP32 Adapter Board you can add to your purchase to make life a bit easier.
