TAVMSX beta 4 - speech synthesis for MSX1

Dutch MSX turboR owners will probably remember the PCM based text-to-speech program 'Zeg het maar' (just say it), with which you could make your turboR pronounce simple texts in Dutch. Although the idea was very nice - and the effect certainly unique to MSX - other retro platforms such as the Commodore 64 clearly had the upper-hand with the release of SAM (Software Automated Mouth) as early as 1982.

But now, finally, there is a speech synthesis program that is equally impressive. The Argentine developer Pastbytes created an application called TAV (Texto A Vox) for multiple platforms, including MSX1! With this utility, you can make your MSX pronounce Spanish sentences and you can even make it sing!

This little gem was discovered by MsxKun, who is helping the developer to test and further improve the tool. Pastbytes is very curious to receive feedback from MSX fans, which will certainly motivate him to develop the beta version further. Perhaps an English version would be an option as well?

Relevant link: TAV

Comments (7)

By Meits

Paragon (1527)

29-01-2012, 21:59

I'd test an english version on an international computer...

By Google

By Grauw

Paragon (1797)

29-01-2012, 23:52

I’ve also got on a disk somewhere a French speech synthesizer for the Music Module. And I also seem to recall one for Japanese (don’t remember what sound chip it used)… It was al lot of fun trying to get them to speak understandable Dutch words ;p.

By msxholder

Expert (88)

30-01-2012, 01:23

Call say "harakiri" is very nice on any computersystem "msx"with an sfg 01 sfg03 sfg05 installesd

By msxholder

Expert (88)

30-01-2012, 01:25

sfg 03 ?

By MsxKun

Champion (445)

30-01-2012, 09:12

For spanish it works pretty fine
It has some bug on real MSX machines (seems to work perfectly on BlueMSX), at least I tested it only on MSX1. Need to do more test.

Hope the author can improve it, cause it's cool. I'm gonna use it to make some speech for some of my tunes Until now I had to use SAM

Oh, and it can be used from BASIC, and has some singing skills!

By fukenko

Scribe (183)

31-01-2012, 00:53

If some Japanese users meet TAV,they might use it as VOCALOID II willy-nilly or make it to speak "私は宇宙の帝王ザカリテ(I'm Xacalite the Emperor of the Galaxy.)" like "SILPHEED"