Speech chips
Meet the synthesizer chips and hear the voices they create.
Browse the chipsPRESERVING ELECTRONIC VOICES
About SpeechChips.com
Before voices lived in the cloud, they lived on a chip. This museum explores the speech synthesizers, talking machines, and inventive people that brought electronic voices into everyday life.
THE COLLECTION
A place to hear how machines found their voice.
SpeechChips.com documents the hardware and ideas behind electronic speech. Explore speech chips and their distinctive sounds, then follow those voices into computers, toys, robots, instruments, and arcade games.
The exhibits bring together photographs, recordings, manuals, technical references, and stories from the people who built and used these systems. The collection is still growing as new material and details come to light.
Talking machines
See how electronic voices became part of real products and play.
Explore the machinesHow speech works
Try an interactive introduction to building a voice from phonemes.
Take the phoneme tourTHE PERSON BEHIND THE MUSEUM
Built from a lifelong fascination with electronic voices.
I’m Scott Savage, an electronics and controls engineer fascinated by the circuits that gave machines their distinctive accents. I started listening to these voices as a teenager, when personal computers were just beginning to find their way into our homes.
Alongside collecting and documenting vintage speech hardware, I created SpeakJet and now design tester boards for a variety of classic speech synthesizer chips. For me, preserving this technology means more than keeping a chip in a display case. It means understanding how it works, hearing it speak, and giving other people the tools to experiment with it.
HELP THE MUSEUM GROW
Have a voice, a story, or a detail to add?
Collectors, engineers, and curious visitors help fill in the gaps. A speech chip, talking machine, old photograph, recording, manual, correction, or memory can help preserve these voices for the next generation.
Help build the museum