Simple talking robot

Giving the voice to a toy always has been a dream when I was a child. There weren’t talking toys and the dream was destinated to stay a dream. With the power of the modern microcontrollers, like Arduino, to have a talking robot is one of the things that always I desidered to do. You can build a talking robot in two ways:

• with the tex-to-speech, writing a text that the robot says
• recording some audio files with inside the voice already recorded that the robot repeats

The text-to-speech is the best way to do a robot talking. You write a text, and he reads the text: this is the fastest way, but you need a chip that implements the text-to-speech. It is easy if your language is English, not easy if your language is different. For me, the language is the Italian and I haven’t found any cheap chip for italian text-to-speech. So I used the second method, recording the voice. The method is more complex, but at the end the result is the same. I built a simple robot, that can be made by every beginner, that does 2 things:

• it goes around, avoiding obstacles with an ultrasound sensor
• it talks, thanks to an audio chip

The robot is basically a toy, that fascinates my son, a little child of few months old. He enjoys to see the robot turn around, talking with robotic voice. I did it just for that.