What will it sound like?
So while I’m still waiting for the part of this project that will do the talking to arrive,
I have been asked several times on social media now, what does this voice sound like.
One of the quickest ways you can find this out if you’ve never heard a Doubletalk is this absolutely fascinating video on Youtube from well-known historical technology enthusiast gallagher123123.
In this video he covers the Book Port, which is one of the devices that I’m basing much of this project on.
The “Port” was the sister product to the Book “Courier”, which I owned. These devices were the successors of the Road Runner (which you can read a review on here which I also owned and handed off to another blind child when I upgraded to my Courier. I’d have been an early teen by this point.
I came home from college in the summer of 2007 desperate to show my girlfriend the Courier, to find it’d been left in the glove compartment of a family car. It’s batteries had fried in the sun and the entire device was ruined. So before I went off to college that prior september was the last time I’d read a book on the thing, in fact it’s probably the journey to college that I’d last used it. An old, faithful friend abandoned and left to swelter and burst in the car. what an unthinking, boorish teen I was.
I am really hoping that enough people will back the Kickstarter so I can afford to resurrect the voice. Yes, it’s robotic and monotone. It’s not what kids have come to expect from their smart speakers and modern phones. But it’s also predictable, fast, consistent, and if I do my job right, will run for over a day of solid talking without a recharge and weeks on standby. What I really want to do with this project is take that old nugget and put it into a new shell. A device you can connect to your computer with a futureproof, reliable cabling standard. A tool that has modern conveniences like wireless charging and data transfer. And a way of keeping alive a tremendously powerful bit of history.