The steps that we provide here are just an introduction to programming the
SpeakJet. The SpeakJet user guide is available at http://www.speakjet.com, under
the Documentation heading.If you need more information, we suggest you try the SpeakJet discussion
forum athttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/speakjetYou can get the PhraseALator software that you use to program the chip athttp://magnevation.com/software/PhraseALator.zipThe manufacturer assures us that it is creating a manual for the PhraseALator.
Go to http://www.speakjet.comand check under Documentation to see whether
it’s been posted.By using this chip and software to program it, you can get some pretty neat
functionality. For example, at your disposal is a built-in set of 72 speech ele-
ments, 43 sound effects, 3 octaves of musical notes, and 12 touch tones. By
mixing and matching these and controlling the pitch, rate, bend, and volume
settings, you can produce just about any sound, phrase, or musical tones
you want.After you install the software on your computer, you can simply assign pre-
loaded sounds to the circuit of this project, which we cover in the next set of
steps. Or, you can get fancy and start programming sounds or even words of
your choosing. If you want to get fancy, it will take some playing around to
learn the software (which is beyond the scope of this book). As we said, not
much extensive documentation is available for it at this point, but with a little
trial and error, you can get the hang of it.For our purposes, we used the sounds that the manufacturer preloaded. Here
are the steps involved in this procedure:- Open the PhraseALator software and click the Event Configuration
button.
The upcoming Figure 7-19 shows the SpeakJet Event Configuration that
we loaded onto our chip. The items in the Phrase# to Play column in this
figure indicate phrases that the manufacturer has preloaded. - Select the check boxes in the Play Phrase column only for input
events listed as Goes Low.
160 Part II: Sounding Off!