I think Echo PC II should be supported by lots of games for PCM sound output, as there's DIGPAK (by John Ratcliff) support. I'm going to check that soon as Echo PC II is coming my way, but Cloudschatze must have checked it already.

About Hearsay 1000 compatible games: I'll test them out, but first it seems I have to acquire a period-adequate PC. My IBM 300GL PII-400 just can't do it, since the games usually are not coded to run on such systems, they're not tied to timer or video vertical blank, and run like there's a stuck fast forward button.

My first PC was 486 DX4-100 back in 1995, and everything before that is obscure for me. Do I need a fast 286 to check whatever games were there in the late 80's? Or is it a slow 386? A fast 386? A slow 486? I believe that 486 CPU appeared in the late 1989, but don't think it reached the general masses any soon.

bristlehog wrote:

I think Echo PC II should be supported by lots of games for PCM sound output, as there's DIGPAK (by John Ratcliff) support.

And AIL, by extension. Unfortunately, the PCM playback method/routine of the later Echo PC II isn't compatible with the earlier Echo PC+, limiting known software support of the latter to just a trio of Stickybear edutainment titles, and a half-dozen-or-so "read-along" books produced by Berta-Max.

bristlehog wrote:

...and run like there's a stuck fast forward button.

I had a similar problem with the Echo PC+ demonstration on the 486 system in the video. The internal CPU cache had to be disabled, and a separate TSR (FASTECHO.COM) had to be used, in order to get proper, non-chipmunk output. I imagine the 8086 and 80286 were probably the target class of systems for these types of cards.

Hello. I was surfing the Internet and came across this board. I was surprised to see people still interested in the Hearsay 1000. I designed that thing back in the 1980s. To clarify any confusion, the Hearsay 1000 was a speech synthesis and speech recognition system for IBM PC, Commodore 64, and Apple IIe. It was the only device available at the time that would speak text as it was printed to the screen and allow the user to speak commands instead of typing them on the keyboard. It redirected the INT10 and INT16 vectors to capture text from any program and insert spoken words into the keyboard buffer. It was amazing at the time to be able to play games such as Zork by speaking the commands and having the story read to you.

Although compared to today's technology it doesn't seem that big of a deal. Back then everyone who saw or heard it thought it was incredible.

Hearsay wrote on 2020-12-16, 03:03:

I designed that thing back in the 1980s.

Any chance you'd be open to sharing who you are for the future record? I remember having Hearsay 1000 in my QA shop, and we did test it with a number of products early on. I also wrote about it in several publications back then (like Computer Gaming World). I may even still have mine in my collection somewhere.

Agrajag27 wrote on 2020-12-16, 05:36:

Hearsay wrote on 2020-12-16, 03:03:

I designed that thing back in the 1980s.

Any chance you'd be open to sharing who you are for the future record? I remember having Hearsay 1000 in my QA shop, and we did test it with a number of products early on. I also wrote about it in several publications back then (like Computer Gaming World). I may even still have mine in my collection somewhere.

Sure, My name is Edward Garrity. If anyone has any questions on the Hearsay 1000, I will try my best to answer them.

I came across 3 echo PC + cards that were installed in 3 IBM model 30 machines. Does anyone have drivers and software for this. I'd love mess around with this in the yr 2023

Here's quick short of one of the cards.
https://youtube.com/shorts/3hRJFXg_Vrs?si=cGW7ZmlyXYqXYuTj

Are we still looking for the original Hearsay software, or has that been archived by now?

If anyone is still interested in information on the Hearsay 1000, I would be glad to answer any questions you may have about it. I designed that almost 40 years ago and it is great to see that people are still interested in it.

Ed Garrity

Hi Ed, I'm very interested in the technical details of how the device could recognize words without any voice training on such limited processing power. I'm assuming the attached computer did all of the processing? Is there a basic algorithm or technique that was used to recognize words?