Hungarian text reader for Commodore 64

In 1982, the speech research group of the Institute of Telecommunications Electronics (HEI) of the Budapest University of Technology (BME), led by Géza Gordos, started to research Hungarian text-to-speech conversion, in cooperation with the Phonetics Laboratory of the Institute of Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. An SGS small computer was put into operation and a circuit and software were designed to control the MEA 8000 language-independent formant-based speech synthesizer chip. The software was developed by György Takács, the phonetic control was planned by Gábor Olaszy. This was the Scriptovox text-to-speech converter. His voice was robotic but clear. Scriptovox was implemented into an external unit connected to the parallel port of the Commodore-64. The commercial name of the unit was Microvox-64. This was the first commercially available general-purpose text-to-speech converter unit connected to a commercial computer. The successor of MEA 8000, the PCF 8200 chip has already been used for the serial production. The solution has become very noticeable in the scientific world (especially out of Hungary) that text-to-speech has been produced with such little resources. It was popular and bought by many creative users in Hungary.