The BIG BUDDY TALKER Is an Arduino and Raspberry Pi Compatible Speech Board

These days, most people that want speech output from a project will go the purely digital: installing text-to-speech software on a computer and relying on a sound card for audio output. That works well, and is hugely versatile, but has the obvious downside of requiring an actual computer, a large library, and a sound card. The BIG BUDDY TALKER provides an antidote to that complexity with a simple hardware solution.

The BIG BUDDY TALKER is a small board that stores sound clips in onboard chips—no external memory is required. That may sound familiar, because a similar device called the Little Buddy Talker was Kickstarted earlier this year by creator Patrick Thomas Mitchell. The Little Buddy Talker was capable of storing 254 word-length sound bites, but the BIG BUDDY TALKER quadruples that to 1,016 clips.

Those sound bites are pre-recorded, but encompass a large selection of common words that will satisfy most people’s needs. You can even submit suggestions, and Patrick might include them on the production board. Control for the BIG BUDDY TALKER is handled by SPI, so it’s easy to use from just about any modern single-board computer or microcontroller (like a Raspberry Pi or Arduino).

If you want a BIG BUDDY TALKER, you can get one on Kickstarter until May 1st for just $18 CAD (about $14 USD). Orders should ship in May.