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It certainly was, yes. The BBC Micro had an optional hardware speech synth you could add, but it was very inflexible, limited to a fairly small set of pre-defined words. "Speech!" could render arbitrary phonemes which make it a lot more flexible.



Flexible enough to say the word "Citadel!" for example. :)

</nostalgia>


You can try it in your browser; Go to https://bbc.godbolt.org/?&disc1=sth%3ASuperior%2FSpeech.zip, then copy and paste this to the paste thing at the top right:

SPEECH SAY Hello *SAY How are you?


Thanks for the link. :)

My comment was intended as an incredibly subtle reference to the trivia that the BBC Micro game "Citadel" 'famously' had speech generated by "Speech!" in its intro screen (but appreciate you taking the time to share the link :) ) as shown here : https://youtu.be/Hu5vu9SgGZI?t=44

For anyone else wanting to try out the emulator link in the comment above, HN messed up the formatting, so the asterisk prefixes were missed on the first two commands:

    *SPEECH

    *SAY Hello

    *SAY How are you?




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