Currah Microspeech - 8 Bit Technology

Currah were a UK based manufacturer of technology and peripherals for 8-bit micro's in the 1980's. They mostly produced add-ons for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64. These computers were the two most popular 8-bit machines of the decade.

Their most famous piece of kit was the 'Currah Microspeeh' unit which gave your trusty machine the ability to parse text and turn each word into a 'spoken word'. Speech units were popualr pieces of kit in the 1980's - the famous cold war hacker movie War Games making good use of a speech synthesizer throughout the film - which gave 'Joshua' more personality to the movie-goer.

The speech unit was connected to your Spectrum via the edge connector, the RF lead from you TV was plugged into the speech unit and you were ready to rock and roll.

With nevous excitement making you twitch uncontrollably, you tentatively pressed a letter on the keyboard....

It worked! Your faithful Spectrum now sounded like a Dalek! The robotic monotone voice coming from your TV speaker was not a speech by Katie Price, it was your computer interpretting letters and making them into sounds. Unbelievable!

You were now in the space age, and it was not long before you were programming your Spectrum to make full use of the power of speech

Using the software provided with your speech unit, making your humble Speccy say anything was easy. Using a simple BASIC program, you could interface with microspeech and make your computer say anything. It was even possible to add a bit of intonation to a sentence by using capital letters in your string of letters making your Speccy sound slightly irate.

Here is how:

5 REM OKAY
10 LET a$=" (oo)K (aa)"
20 LET S$=a$

5 REM OKAY IRATE
10 LET a$=" (oo)K (AA)"
20 40 LET S$=a$

Scripted conversations with your computer could be setup by clever and painstaking programming. It certainly amazed the older generation back then I can tell you!

There were quite a few games for the ZX Spectrum that supported Currah Microspeech. This added a whole new dimension to gaming and was quite exciting when you first tried it.

Here is list of some of the ZX Spectrum Games that supported Currah Microspeech:

Twin Kingdom Valley (text adventure) could describe every location to you
Lunar Jetman
3D Monster Maze
Blasteroids
Voice Chess - informing you of each move as you go
Golf - it wasn't quite Peter Allis but it did the job

Playing these games with speech support was (at first) brilliant. But I think most of us found that after a while it did get annoying - the monotone robotic voice would drill into your brain with, deeper and deeper until you could take it no more. Eventually you would switch it off and listen to Billy Idol at full blast to ease your aching head.

Currah Microspeech came at a time when technology was becoming more common in the everyday home. You just know it's a product of it's era:

Generally too advanced for the 70's
Too crappy for the 90's
It's gotta be from the 80's.

It has a place in our hearts and we love it! Memories...