QTalk

Maxtronics R&D Ltd of New Zealand produced the QTalk speech synthesiser for the QL. It connected to an RS232 port on the QL, the QL power supply connected to the QTalk unit and a short power lead went from the unit to the QL itself. It came with text to speech software and had a device driver called "QTK" which allowed easy programming by means of OPEN and PRINT# commands.

The unit had three adjustable presets, allowing adjustment of volume, pitch and pitch range. The software featured text to speech conversion, over 400 rules to convert text to speech, with an "exception table" for words which the unit could not be expected to understand.

Maxtronics claimed it could be "the last word in QL clocks" as it could talk the time an date!

Maxtronics also sold some games for it, written by Chisoft including Alien Hijack and Puzzle Mania which made good use of the speech synthesiser.