Text-to-Speech Module – Emic 2

Ever wish your project could just speak up and tell you what’s going on? Why not give it a voice? The Emic-2 Text-to-Speech module makes it really easy to give voice to your embedded projects.

The Emic-2 was designed by Parallax in conjunction with Grand Idea Studio to make voice synthesis a total no-brainer. Simply connect the Emic-2 to a 5VDC power supply, connect a speaker to the speaker output (or 1/8″ headphone jack) and send it a stream of serial text at 9600bps. The module contains all of the smarts necessary to parse the text into phonemes and then generate natural sounding speech, all your controller has to do is send serial strings.

The command set for the module is entirely comprised of ASCII-based printable characters and allows you to change languages (English or Spanish), change between 9 different voices, and even control speech parameters on the fly. The module also communicates back to your system so you can get settings, version information and even “finished speaking” flags back from the board.

If you’ve ever thought about building a robot that sings your twitter feed or wakes you up in the morning with random snippets of beat poetry, this is the way to do it!