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There existed a Russian text-to-speech program written for the Elektronika BK-0010 in the early 1980s, whose length was 023500 bytes = 10048, mentioned in a list of application programs for the BK-0010 under the name of ГОВОРУН ("Chatterer", after a talking bird in a childrens' book/cartoon The Mystery of the Third Planet). A clever hacker recently ported the algorithm to Javascript, so you can hear it in your browser. It runs on the Commodore 64 and other machines. SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) was one of the first, and one of the more popular. Still, there were a number of respectable attempts. The fact is that the classic 8/16 bit processors just don't have enough oomph to pull off speech synthesis in software well, at least in real time. The chips can synthesize basic phonemes and words, and a microcontroller or microprocessor has to do the text analysis and drive the synthesis chip. The Ti LPC speech synthesis chips, as used in the Speak and Spell products, were similar. Internally, I vaguely recall reading that it's a mix of a general-purpose processor with dedicated signal processors and audio synthesis hardware. It is effectively a closed box that is sent ASCII text and generates line-level audio.
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For example, the classic DECTalk system, famously the voice of the late Stephen Hawking, was a discrete unit that connected by serial RS-232. Most of the iconic early voice synthesizers were not purely software systems.