BME-MULTIVOX family

Phonetically based, speech synthesis, text-to-speech

The Multivox speech synthesizer family was a joint development of the Department of Telecommunications and Telematics of BME (hardware and software) and the Phonetics Laboratory of the Institute of Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (phonetic data, rules, language adaptations, tests) in the 80-ies. First the formant-controlled MEA 8000 chip and later its improved version the PCF8200 chip were used for speech generation. This was a data driven synthesis method. The Multivox family consisted of three members in the order of development: Multivox-8 multilingual text-to-speech converter (program + external synthesiser unit with parallel port connection to a PC). The second member was the PC Robot card, which triggered the external unit and was located inside the PC. It only had a speaker output connector. The third member was the free downloadable Multivox-4 software speech synthesizer, which had no hardware components. The fact that the computers themselves developed rapidly contributed greatly to all this developments. The speech of the Multivox family was clear, with a slightly robotic character.