Speak & Spell

The Speak & Spell is a series of talking educational toys developed by Texas Instruments and first released in 1978. It was initially concieved as a way to comerciallise Texas Instruments' research in speach synthesis technology which used a method known as Linear Predictive Coding. TI was a leader in speech synthesis at the time. The same series of speech synthesizer chips would later be used not only in TI's products (including the TI-99/4A home computer) but also several arcade games and home computers from other manufacturers.

The Speak & Spell became an iconic toy and has been frequently featured in pop-culture, perhaps most notably in Steven Spielberg's E.T. TI discontinued the Speak & Spell in 1992, but the brand was revived by in 2019 when the company Basic Fun released an updated version.