In the late 1970s and early 1980s,
General Instrument, like nearly every microelectronics manufacturer, was rolling out their own series of microprocessors and support chips in hopes of gaining a share of the then-new and rapidly exploding market for increasingly sophisticated consumer and industrial electronics. One of the peripheral and support chips introduced for G.I.'s microprocessors was the
SP0256 Narrator
speech synthesizer chip. Since the Intellivision was based on General Instrument's CP1610 microprocessor and support chips, and talking electronic products (such as
Texas Instruments'
Speak & Spell) had already captured the public's fascination, Mattel Electronics decided to develop an add-on speech-synthesis module for the console. Engineer Ron Carlson was put in charge of designing a device capable of utilizing the chip. Programmer Ron Surratt was hired to write the
software for the module, and Patrick Jost would analyze the voice data for the device. The Narrator had 2
KB of
Read-Only Memory (ROM), and this was utilized to store a database of generic words that could be combined to make phrases in Intellivision games. The words included numbers, "press", "enter", "and", "or", and "Mattel Electronics Presents" in a generic male voice. These phrases (as well as the speech for the first game,
Space Spartans) were recorded and digitized by Carlson and Jost at General Instrument's facility in New York, and the resulting data was turned into a mask so that a customized version of the SP0256 could be manufactured with the generic phrases permanently stored inside the chip. Since the Orator chip could also accept speech data from external memory, any additional words or phrases needed for specific games could be stored inside the game cartridge itself. According to Ron Surratt, when he first received Carlson & Jost's data from G.I.'s New York facility and loaded it into the prototype unit, all the device would do was repeat "Auk yooo! Auk yooo!" repeatedly to the Mattel executives and marketing personnel who had come to see the demonstration. This led to several heated phone calls between Hawthorne and New York, and considerable finger-pointing between the hardware and software camps until the problem was found. Once the bugs were resolved, Mattel Electronics committed itself to producing voice games and built a state-of-the-art voice lab at their Hawthorne, California facility to do the recording and digitization on site.
International Intellivoice This unit would have contained additional internal ROMs with the built-in "generic" library of words translated into French, German, and Italian, and would have been sold along with appropriately translated versions of the Intellivoice titles into those markets. While at least two prototypes were known to have been built, and translated versions of
Space Spartans were programmed, neither they nor the International Intellivoice were ever released.
Intellivoice II A restyled version of the Intellivoice module, designed to match the "white brick" style of the redesigned Intellivision II Master Component, appeared in the 1983 Intellivision catalog. However, no such restyled module was ever actually produced, not even as a prototype; the module seen in the catalog is simply a carved and painted block of wood. ==Market failure==