Favorite toy no. 257: Speak & Spell. In 1978, Texas Instruments introduced the first single-chip speech synthesizer which was able to electronically duplicate the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon. In charming and fresh fashion, their first product was the Speak & Spell for children and it quickly became one of the most popular toys of the ’80s.
The inviting bleeps and gentle man-voice have since been sampled by various artists, including Kraftwerk and Dopplereffekt, and the machines themselves have been reconstructed into crazy-ass synthesizers by those with know-how. Texas Instruments went on to produce boring calculators for adults, but they’ll always be grandfather of the talking toy and that makes them supercool.
