TEXAS INSTRUMENTS, INC. (TI)

Dallas, Texas


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HISTORY OF THE ORGANIZATION

Texas Instruments started in the 1930s as Geophysical Service, a
company using seismology to find oil. The 1940s found the company,
named Geophysical Service Inc. (GSI), heavily occupied with 
developing military products for the World War II effort. In the
1950s, the company, now Texas Instruments, moved into mass 
production of silicon transistors, the first transistor radio, 
and invention of integrated circuit technology. The 1960s brought 
global expansion of manufacturing and the invention of the hand-
held calculator. By the 1970s, TI's technology for integrated 
circuits and microprocessors allowed the invention of an affordable
educational toy, the Speak & Spell. (From "History of Innovation", 
www.ti.com)


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PROJECT: SPEAK & SPELL TOY  (1976 - 1995)


Speech synthesis from stored LPC words and phrases using TMC 0280
one-chip LPC speech synthesizer. Speech data in up to sixteen 128K 
ROM chips (TMC 0350). Plug-in modules increased vocabulary and
provided for versions in French, German, Spanish and British
English.


1978 Wiggins, R. and L. Brantingham, "Three-chip system
     synthesizes human speech," Electronics, Aug 31, 1978, 109-116.
     Uses TMC 0280, LPC-10, 600-2400 bps.


1980 Wiggins, R., "An integrated circuit for speech synthesis,"
     Proc. ICASSP-80, 398-401 (1980).  (K)

     SSSHP 118.2 Tape: "Voice Output From Computers, Course 430, 
              Integrated Computers Systems, 1980."
              ("Spell 'money' ... M-O-N-E-Y. That is correct. Now
               spell 'was'...", several phrases)
               Cassette, good quality

     SSSHP 32.13 Tape: Demo for "Review of Text-to-Speech Conversion
          for English, D.H. Klatt, JASA 82.3, Sept. 1987.
          (5 sen: "Now spell 'one'... is E, A, R, T, H")
          Cassette, Klatt MIT A/D and D/A


1982 Frantz, Gene A. and Richard H. Wiggins, "Design case history:
     Speak & Spell learns to talk," IEEE Spectrum, Feb. 1982, 
     pp. 45-49. Development of Speak & Spell speech synthesizer.


1993 SSSHP 111 Reprints: Selected documents to 1993 relating to 
          Texas Instruments' Speak & Spell development as a 
          product (see SSSHP USA Texas Instruments file.) 
          Some documents need permission to be reproduced.


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PROJECT: TEXT-TO-SPEECH SYNTHESIS (1979 - 19   )

Later refinements to the Speak & Spell chips resulted in the 
TMS 5100, 5200 and 5220 Voice Synthesis Processors for use in 
commercial products needing synthetic speech voice output from 
digitally-stored words and phrases. 

"In 1979, Dr. Kun Lin and I began a project to extract speech 
sounds from the LPC coded speech for the TI 99-4A Home Computer 
as an add-on module for programmers to add speech to the programs 
they would write for themselves on the computer. Kun Lin directed 
me to extract up to 128 speech segments from the TI LPC-encoded 
speech libraries for the purpose of being strung together using
text-to-speech rules adapted from the NRL's text-to-phoneme rules. 
[see SSSHP USA Naval Research Laboratory]  In order to make the 
NRL rules for text-to-speech adapt to the LPC allophone set, I 
added about 650 rules to generate allophones in appropriate places: 
for instance, backed versions of velar stops before the set of back 
vowels. The text-to-speech module was released in 1981."  (KGM)


1980 Preliminary Data Manual for TMS 5200. (See SSSHP USA TI file.)


1981 Lin, Kun-Shan, Gene A. Frantz and Kathy Goudie, "Software
     rules give personal computer real word power," Electronics,
     Feb. 10, 1981. Text-to-speech to be used in TI 99-4A personal
     computer.  (Copy in SSSHP USA TI file.)


1982 Use of TMS-5220 in Echo text to speech system, made by Street 
     Electronics Corp., Carpinteria, California. "The Echo low-
     cost text-to-speech system concatenates linear-prediction 
     diphones using the Texas Instrument's TMS-5220 linear pre-
     diction synthesizer chip." (K)

     SSSHP 32.29 Tape: Demo to accompany "Review of Text-to-speech
          conversion for English," D.H. Klatt, JASA 82.3, Sep 1987.
          (syn, 4 sen: "The birch canoe slid on the smooth planks.
          Glue the sheet to the dark blue background. ... These 
          days a chicken leg is a rare dish.")
          Cassette, Klatt MIT A/D and D/A


MAGIC WAND Speaking Reader. "LPC allophone speech was also 
used in the TI MAGIC WAND Speaking Reader, a product that came out 
shortly before Texas Instruments discontinued its Consumer Products
Division in 1983. Text-to-speech capability was used in the develop-
ment of bar-code readable books for children as a first-pass genera-
ting of the strings of allophones and their accompanying prosody. 
The first-pass strings would then be edited to produce the optimal
allophone strings and prosody that would then be coded into bar-codes
under the written text of the printed book. A small bar-code reader
could then be passed over the bar-code and the MAGIC WAND reader 
would string the stored allophones together to speak the passage."  
(KGM)

     MAGIC WAND speech sample (.wav, 200KB)


"I then moved to George Doddington's Speech Research Group in TI in
Dallas to work on a version of MITalk [see SSSHP USA MIT] that TI 
leased for inclusion in the TI990 Professional Computer, to be 
included on a Speech Board add-on. My task was to revise the linguis-
tic part of the licensed program (written in C) to improve the intel-
ligibility of the speech sounds and the accuracy of the rules for 
text-to-phoneme translation. This speech board was made available 
from TI in 1985 and included the capability of straight digital 
speech recording, LPC-encoded recording and generation of text-to-
speech."  (KGM)


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BIOGRAPHIES


PAUL S. BREEDLOVE

1963 BSEE, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX
1963 Junior Engr., IBM Corporation, San Jose, CA
1964 Design Engr., Collins Radio Company, Richardson, TX
1967 MSEE, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX
1970 Sr. Appl. Engr., Motorola Semiconductor, Tempe, AZ
1972 Texas Instruments, various locations in Texas
     Mgr., Worldwide Computer Segment Strategy, TI
1992 Dir. of Tech., CompuAdd Computer Corporation, 
     Austin, TX
1993 Mgr., Business Dev., digital cinema technology, 
     TI, Dallas, TX
2001 retired


GEORGE LAWRENCE BRANTINGHAM

1971 BSEE University of Arkansas
1972 MSEE University of Arkansas
1972 Telex Computer Products
1973 IC designer, Consumer Products Group, TI, Dallas, TX
1977 Branch mgr., IC design, TI Consumer Products Group, 
     Lubbock, TX
1980 Mgr., speech research group, TI European Speech 
     Laboratory, Nice, France
1985 Mgr., consumer speech chips, TI Semiconductor, Dallas, TX
1988 Advanced technology, TI Consumer Products Group, Dallas, TX
1991 Mgr., TI Component Design Group, Avezzano, Italy
1994 Mgr, Advanced Technology, TI Personal Productivity 
     Products Group
1996 Co-owner, Quadravox, Inc., Richardson,TX


GENE A. FRANTZ

1971 B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Univ. of Central Florida
1974 Consumer Products Group, Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX
1977 M.S. in Electrical Engineering, Southern Methodist Univ.
1982 MBA, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX
1984 Business Dev. Mgr., Digital Signal Processing,
     Semiconductor Group, TI, Houston, TX


LIN, KUN-SHAN


KATHLEEN M. GOUDIE MARSHALL

1971 BA, Linguistics & Psychology, Oakland University, Rochester, MI
1973 AM, Linguistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
1979 PhD, Linguistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
1979 Member of Technical Staff, TI Consumer Products Division, 
     Lubbock, TX
1984 Member of Technical Staff, TI Speech Research Group, Dallas, TX
1986-88 Synthetic Speech Consultant (Tutor Toys, Worlds of Wonder),
     Ann Arbor, MI


RICHARD H. WIGGINS

1963 BS in Mathematics, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA
1963 National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland
1966 MA in Mathematics, American University, Washington, D.C.
1966 The MITRE Corp, Bedford MA
1971 MS in Applied Mathematics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
1973 PhD in Applied Mathematics, Harvard University
1976 Central Research Lab., Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX
1982 Dir. Speech Tech., Commodore Business Machines, Dallas, TX
1984 Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX
1998 retired


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CONTRIBUTIONS BY:

Paul S. Breedlove
Larry Brantingham
Kathleen Goudie Marshall 

Texas Instruments, Inc.

Quoted material "KGM" is from a personal communication from 
Kathleen Goudie Marshall to H.D. Maxey, May 1, 2001. Magic Wand 
.WAV file courtesy of Texas Instruments. (See SSSHP USA TI file.)


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