How can I produce simple electronic sounds

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tpny

Joined May 6, 2012
220
I want to make a device for my nephew that can make simple sounds like announcing "1", "2", "3".. when he presses some buttons. How do I go about with the sound part? Is there some chip, transducer, magic?? I have really no idea in that department any suggestion would be appreciated. Thanks!
 

Wendy

Joined Mar 24, 2008
23,415
It can be done, and probably relatively simply, but you are going to have to learn to program µC such PICs.
 

ErnieM

Joined Apr 24, 2011
8,377
You could just get one of these:



Seriously, Radio Shack used to sell some modules or chips... I remember one I got off their discount rack decades ago that would emit phonemes... was kinda fun. They may still have some recordable modules.

I got what may be a few good hits googling "Sound Module" as there are places that sell greeting card modules you can record your own greeting on... but that means 1 module per phrase.
 

absf

Joined Dec 29, 2010
1,968
You might take a look at this link here. Someone has used an Arduino to produce speech.

http://letsmakerobots.com/node/13210

The Apple II has a speech card called "SAM" aka Software Automated Mouth. On the card was a DAC and an audio amp. The speech was produed mainly in software. So a microchip PIC with a DAC might be able to do it if the database for the words to speak is not too large.

Allen
 
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MrChips

Joined Oct 2, 2009
30,712
There are two ways that come to mind but both will require knowledge of microcomputer interfacing and programming.

The first is the Votrax chip which may be hard to find now. It is a sound synthesizer that allows one to output speech from text input. The speech sound is very robotic.

The second method is to use an audio recording chip which can digitize and store short or long clips of audio. Winbond makes these in an array of different sizes. With this chip you can record your own speech sounds to produce human sounding voices.

I have used both methods, the latter being used for a telephone ID announcer.
 

BMorse

Joined Sep 26, 2009
2,675
I also agree with absf about the speakjet IC, I have used this in quite a few projects, it can be used by itself without a microcontroller it is just programmed via a PC with magnevations phrase-a-letor software....

The SpeakJet is a completely self contained, single chip voice and complex sound synthesizer by Magnevation. SpeakJet uses Mathematical Sound Architecture tm (MSA) technology which controls an internal five channel sound synthesizer to generate on-the-fly, unlimited vocabulary speech synthesis and complex sounds
without the use of analog or digitally recorded samples. The SpeakJet has a built in library of 72 speech elements (allophones), 43 sound effects, and 12 DTMF Touch Tones. Through the selection of these MSA components and in combination with the control of the pitch, rate, bend, and volume parameters, the user has the ability to produce unlimited phrases and sound effects, with thousands of variations, at any time.
This does not require too many external components to work, most components will be with the audio amp circuit to amplify the output, but then again, you can get a prebuilt audio amp or in kit form from various manufacturers, some linked to by others in previous posts.
 

djsfantasi

Joined Apr 11, 2010
9,156
One question that hasn't been asked is how many sounds/buttons do you want this device to support? 4? 5? 8?... limited only by total time?
 
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