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DecTalk, an early text-to-speech device. The story goes that one member of the team, whose voice was used as the basis for the sounds, lost his voice.

Dr. Dennis Klatt. He developed cancer (throat of some sort, I'd assume) and did lose his voice but died within a year, AFAIK.

Perhaps more memorable than the very notable DECTalk, he built original voice synthesizer for, and was the voice of, Stephen Hawkings.



DECtalk, IIRC, was much higher quality than Stephen Hawking’s voice synth. A real shame to hear this story about the owner of that voice.


Well...a DECtalk also weighs about 15 lbs and is packed with components. So it was probably a weight/quality tradeoff considering it needed to be mounted on a wheelchair.

I understand Hawkings last version use a Raspberry PI, with the original voice.


I think the unit was more or less the shape/size of a VT-240. Is that right?


It's heavier as noted, but yeah that's a pretty good description.


I was a kid when I saw one, in Brazil, at a computer convention. It was, probably "Feira Internacional de Informática" in Brazil, in the early 1980s. The DEC team was incredibly friendly, even to two kids (I went there with a cousin) who would, maybe, be their customers, 20 years later.

I became one. My cousin followed another career.




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