Speak N’ Spell

The Speak & Spell line is a series of electronic hand-held child computers by Texas Instruments that consisted of a TMC0280 linear predictive coding speech synthesizer, a keyboard, and a receptor slot to receive one of a collection of ROM game library modules (collectively covered under patent US 3934233). The first Speak & Spell was introduced at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in June 1978, making it one of the earliest handheld electronic devices with a visual display to use interchangeable game cartridges. The company Basic Fun brought the classic Speak & Spell in 2019 although with some minor changes.

The Speak & Spell was named an IEEE Milestone in 2009.