Text to speech TTS with PIC24

[SergioMForster]

I am working on a project with PIC24EP512, which I need to be able to "speak" in Spanish, "reading" ASCII text sent by a serial interface.

To achieve this, I was testing with an Epson TTS Chip S1V30120.

I already have it working but the phonetics (male or female) are horrific, it looks like a newly arrived Slavic immigrant.

I don't want to use an ISD chip of prerecorded messages, since it would limit what it can "talk" to what was previously recorded and the idea is to be able to send it different messages in real time and it can "read" them.

Anyone know of any other TTS chip, with Spanish language?

Thanks in advance.

[Ttelmah]

There are actually about three 'parts' to this.
Often overlooked, the filtering used on the chip output, massively affects
the quality of the result. Few chips produce anything remotely useable
unless reasonable care with a bandpass filter on the speech range.
Then you have the algorithm that converts text to phonetics. Generally
versions with larger libraries achieve better results. So a dedicated DSP,
rather than a off the shelf chip.
Then you have the actual phonetics to waveform conversion. Actually the
easiest part.

I've used the EarBridge ENC1 module quite successfully. And, on a cheaper
product The RC8650, which performed quite well.

On the latter, my PIC had an SD card, and I programed the user dictionary
from this, to cope with different languages. It is possible to do this using a
PC serial port, with a MAX232 and an extra resistor to allow the serial input
to be driven from two sources.
You can also use your own phonetics for any words that don't convert
well with the default engine. The chip allows text to speech and phonetic
to speech modes. I had a number of technical words that did not
give good results.