Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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I bought a Speech Prose 2000 speech synthesizer. This is a multibus board that can be used as an external standalone speech synthesizer as well. It sounds a lot like a Dectalk, and in fact the Dectalk and the Speech Prose 2000 were based on the same speech model. Doing some research, the Speech Prose 2000 was the first speech synthesizer used by Stephen Hawking, and many people will recognize the characteristic voice. A lot of folks conflate the Speech Prose 2000 and the Dectalk, as the voice sounds a lot like Dectalk's "Perfect Paul" voice. In this video you'll see me go through some of the components on the board, then we'll mount it in a multibus backplane and make it speak! For more vintage computer projects, see smbaker.com