The first Hungarian, portable talking computer to help the blind

The first Hungarian, portable talking computer (BraiLab) was developed by Dr. András Arató and his wife Teréz Vaspöri (in the Central Physical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) specifically to help the blind. The machine’s speech synthesizer was the formant control based, programmable chip MEA 8000, launched by Philips in 1983. The Hungarian text-to-speech speech synthesis was developed by the developers.

Hundreds of the first BraiLab machines were produced. His voice was robotic, but blind users quickly got used to it. Later, the machine was further developed and they created the BraiLab PC, which worked with the newer speech synthesizer from Philips, the PCF8200 chip. The sound quality of the synthesized speech has also been improved. By the 90s, there were already thousands of users of BraiLab PC. It has been used by the blind in schools and has also helped the blind users in employment. It was a revolutionary development.