June 11, 1978 — Texas Instruments Introduces Speak & Spell

On this day, Texas Instruments introduced Speak & Spell, an educational electronic toy that became many children’s first experience with a “talking computer.”

At first glance, it was a simple device for learning spelling. A child would hear a word, type it letter by letter on the keyboard, and the device would tell them whether they had spelled it correctly. But the real breakthrough was not the educational aspect — it was the way Speak & Spell spoke.

For the first time, a mass-market consumer product used a dedicated speech-synthesis chip. Instead of playing back pre-recorded audio, the device generated human speech electronically. It became one of the earliest major demonstrations of the potential of digital speech processing.

In the late 1970s, this felt almost like science fiction. Computers were still rare, yet here was a small device that could speak words in a human voice right in your home.

Speak & Spell was a commercial success and led to an entire family of products, including Speak & Read and Speak & Math. A few years later, the toy unexpectedly gained a second life thanks to the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, where it was used by the main character to communicate with the alien.

Today, Speak & Spell is remembered as one of the most iconic electronic devices of the late 1970s and an important milestone in the history of consumer electronics and speech-synthesis technology.