• Narrow 28-pin DIP
• Companion chip to Magnevation SpeakJet or the Savage Innovations SpeakGin
• Built in 600 Rule database convert English text to phoneme codes
• 9600 N81 Baud Serial interface (TTL level)
• Generate speech from ASCII text
• Compatible with Basic Stamp, OOPic, Pic and any processor with a serial port

The TTS256 is an 8-bit microprocessor programmed with letter-to-sound rules. This built-in algorithm allows for the automatic real-time translation of English ASCII characters into allophone addresses compatible with the Magnevation SpeakJet Speech Synthesizer IC. Combine this with the SpeakJet to build a complete text-to-speech solution.

Pin #	TTS256	Pin #	SpeakJet
5	TX (sends serial data to host)
14	Vss (ground)
18	RX (received serial data from host)
20	Ready	15	Buffer Half Full
24	SJ_TX	10	RX
28	Vdd (+5v)

The TTS256 contains over 600 rules for pronouncing English text. While I think it does a pretty good job of the task with a less than 5% error rate in most sentances, I guarantee that it will mispronouce some words.   Often times, some creative spelling will help.

TTS256 Datasheet (PDF)