Chipspeech

Chipspeech is a retro styled vocal synthesizer created to reproduce vintage vocal synthesizers released in the 20th century.

About
Plogue Art et Technologie, Inc is a small company that specialise in chipbased technology and aim to recreate chip effects and sounds and apply them to modern technology. Chipspeech was one of their many ideas they planned for years to create, however, they were held back on the means to execute it. Though they had the technology, they lacked the knowledge. The Chipspeech software was born after they hired a member of their development team with Phonetic knowledge, allowing them to come up with ideas on how to create a vocal synthesizer technology.

The software acts as stand alone or plug-in software to various DAWs. It can sing and talk, supports two languages English and Japanese (though Japanese currently does not have talk capability). There are various means to adjust the vocal to how the user wants, creating some very unique sounds and results.

Unlike Vocaloid, CeVIO or other synthesizers words are typed as sentences. If used as a plug-in into a DAW, the synthesizer will play each sentence n the keyboard. The software is easy to use but requires some work to master.

The software currently has 11 characters, with a option 12th being able to once be downloaded known as "Daisy". Daisy was able to go into Alter/ego and is the only character able to do so. Daisy is, however. currently retired and unavailable for download. The other 11 characters are based on various synthesizer, such as Rotten.ST who is based on Atari ST’s STSPEECH.TOS or Dandy 704 who is based upon the IBM 704 computer. With the exception of Dandy 704, all have a cyberpunk-style character illustration representing each voice, with Dandy 704's instead being Steampunk. There is a basic "storyline" between the characters and a "canon" as per say. However, this does not impact the software itself.

✔ Strengths
The main strength of the engine is it can have a multiple number of synthesizer styles built into it. While some like Dandy 704 or Lady Parsec are based on samples recreation vocals much like Vocaloid or UTAU, others like Dee Klatt do not have samples. They are instead based on direct input, meaning they recreate to various degree faithful recreations of their engine, with Dee Klatt's being a fully rendered "live" feed back. This is a sharp contrast to Vocaloid and other synthesizers, which are centred around just a single style or two of creating results.

The vocals themselves are difficult to find otherwise with many coming directly from chipsets either not compactible with modern computers, or unable to be found in the first place with those who are selling for thousands of dollars. Additional vocals have been provided for free over time as new features. For example, the Circuit Bending feature in version 1.032, which mimicked the circuit bending method of getting unique vocals from the classic old chips. This allowed for 'one of a kind' results.

They can easily recreate non-sensical vocals and provider vocal special effects for use in music and sound, to which it has an almost unlimited amount of results it can recreate. The software is regarded as fun to use and play with.

✘ Weaknesses
The various vocals have varying results of sound. Some are clear and crunchy, while others muffled and vague sounding. As they are based on old technology they are all dated vocals and do not reflect modern sounding vocals. Therefore they at best barely sound human and do not attempt to even sound remotely like an uncanny effect. This can be off putting for those inexperienced with synthesizers of the past.

The software is notorious for its timing issues.