Currah

Currah was a British computer peripheral manufacturer, famous mainly for the speech synthesis ROM cartridges it designed for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and other 8-bit home computers of the 1980s.

Currah μSource from Quadhouse. In a self-contained ROM cartridge it has a full-function-two-pass macro assembler, Forth and a debugger, all of which can interact with Basic. It is also compatible with Interface 1.

The Currah μSpeech, commonly referred to as the Microspeech plugged into the expansion port on the back of the ZX Spectrum. Additional leads were provided to feed the sound and UHF signal from the computer into the unit. The TV aerial lead plugged into the unit and speech sounds were added into the UHF signal generated by computer.

By default, the unit "spoke" every key-press the user made, even the direction keys which came out as "CURSOR". This could be controlled by a reserved variable KEYS. Typing

would turn this feature off.

Specific words and phrases could be spoken by assigning a value to the reserved string variable S$. This was interpreted letter-by-letter unless brackets were used to denote other allophones. A simple example would be "(dth)is", (dth) representing the voiced dental fricative /ð/. Sixty-three allophones were provided. Rudimentary pitch modulation could be achieved by altering the case of the letters—upper case letters being pronounced at a slightly higher pitch.

A more complex example:

The unit contained a ULA which worked on a WRITE command from the microprocessor, a ROM containing the keyword speech patterns, and an SP0256-AL2 speech processor. It also contained a clock for clear speech and an audio modulator to transfer the sound to the TV lead. A small adjustment screw was provided, to allow fine tuning of the audio output.

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