Electronic Speech Systems
| Private | |
| Founded | 1984 |
| Headquarters | Fremont, California |
|
Key people
|
Robert L. Blair: President & CEO John Marsh: Chief Financial Officer |
| Products | Multimedia, Audio DACs, Audio ADCs |
| Website | www.esstech.com |
ESS Technology Incorporated is a private manufacturer of computer multimedia products, Audio DACs and ADCs based in Fremont, California with R&D centers in Kelowna, BC Canada and Beijing, China. It was founded by Forrest Mozer in 1983. Robert L. Blair is the CEO and President of the company.
Historically, ESS Technology was most famous for their line of their Audiodrive chips for audio cards. Now they are known for their line of Sabre DAC and ADC products.
ESS Technologies was founded in 1983 as Electronic Speech Systems, by Professor Forrest Mozer, a space physicist at the University of California, Berkeley and Todd Mozer, Forrest Mozer's son, and Joe Costello, the former manager of National Semiconductors Digitalker line of talking chips. Costello left soon after the formation and started Cadence Designs with his former boss from National. Fred Chan VLSI designer and software engineer, in Berkeley, California, joined in 1985, and took over running the company in 1986 when Todd Mozer left for graduate school.
The company was created at least partially as a way to market Mozer's speech synthesis system (described in US patents 4,214,125, 4,433,434 and 4,435,831) after his (3-year, summer 1978 to summer 1981, extended) contract with National Semiconductor expired in 1983 or so.
Electronic Speech Systems produced synthetic speech for, among other things, home computer systems like the Commodore 64. Within the hardware limitations of that time, ESS used Mozer's technology, in software, to produce realistic-sounding voices that often became the boilerplate for the respective games. Two popular sound bites from the Commodore 64 were "He slimed me!!" from Ghostbusters and Elvin Atombender's "Another visitor - Stay a while, stay forever!" in the original Impossible Mission.
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