SpellSynth is a playable love-letter to the 1978 spelling toy that taught a generation to read — rebuilt for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with five game modes, a crunchy VFD display, and
three vintage voice characters across two decades of speech-synthesis history.
Tap a letter and it speaks. Type ANY word — your name, a made-up word, this week's vocabulary list — and SpellSynth speaks it back.
EVERY WORD SPEAKS
The 500+ bundled words across 20+ themes use a hand-recorded retro voice. Anything else — a name, a foreign word, a made-up word, your
kid's spelling list — falls back to the system speech engine, gets routed through whichever voice character you've picked, and caches to disk so the second tap is instant. There's no "we don't have that word" anymore.
• FREE PLAY — type any word, hear it spoken. The retro segmented display animates every keystroke.
• SPELL — SpellSynth says a word. You spell it. Three mistakes and you get the answer, then try a new one. Tap HINT to reveal a letter when you're stuck.
• MYSTERY WORD — the classic "guess the hidden word" game. You get the category and the first letter free; pick letters until the word reveals itself. Six wrong guesses and it's game over.
• SAY IT — listen-and-repeat mode for pronunciation practice. SpellSynth spells the word letter by letter, then says it whole. Tap REPEAT to hear it again, NEXT for a new word.
• PHRASE — type a multi-word phrase, hear it spoken whole through your chosen voice. The VFD cycles word by word as audio plays. Twelve preset phrases included.
THREE VINTAGE VOICES
Pick a voice character in Settings. Each one draws from a different era of speech-synthesis history, applied to every word you hear:
• 1968 ODYSSEY — calm, deep-baritone monotone with a deliberately slow cadence. Fixed-pitch formant synthesis at ~65 Hz, time-stretched 1.6×. Aesthetic homage to the late-60s sci-fi AI voices.
• 1978 LPC — the original Speak & Spell character. A 10-pole LPC vocoder driven by the actual TMS5220 chirp ROM, the same speech algorithm Texas Instruments shipped in the toy. Buzzy, granular, unmistakable.
• 1986 DECTALK STYLE — fixed-pitch impulse train through formants extracted from your input. Modelled on the Klatt-style synthesis that defined Hawking's iconic computer voice. Deliberate, monotone, emphatically computery.
• DEFAULT — clean system speech, no extra processing. For when you just want clear pronunciation without the retro stamp.
All three work on every word — bundled or live-typed — and cache separately, so toggling between them is instant after the first play. Choice persists across launches.
PLAY WITH A MIDI KEYBOARD
Connect a USB, Bluetooth, or Network MIDI keyboard to your iPad and the keypad becomes playable from real keys. Notes C4–C#6 trigger letters A–Z, so any 25-key controller covers the whole alphabet. Pairs naturally with the LPC voice for a Speak & Spell instrument on your desk.
BUNDLED AUDIO UNIT (AUv3)
SpellSynth ships an AUv3 instrument extension, so the same voice engine loads inside GarageBand, Logic Pro for iPad, AUM, Loopy Pro, Cubasis, and any AUv3-compatible host. Type a word and it speaks live. Eighteen parameters cover pitch, speed, bit-crush, sample-rate reduction, filter, envelope, LFO, stutter, MIDI shaping, and voice character. Six factory presets cover the most-used sounds.
A serious MIDI surface for performers: sustain pedal (CC 64) for hold-and-release phrasing, Channel Pressure (aftertouch) routable to any parameter, three velocity curves (Soft / Linear / Hard), an adjustable pitch-bend range from ±0 to ±12 semitones, and 14 MIDI Learn targets covering every performance knob — bound CCs ride along with the preset. Stutter locks to the host tempo (1/4, 1/8, 1/16), and a Letter Map mode maps A–Z onto MIDI notes 60–85 so you can sequence spelling right in your DAW. Perfect for producers chasing that Kraftwerk / Stereolab / Broadcast sound.
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1.2.0 — multi-word phrases. Type a whole phrase, hear it spoken.
The headline: a new fifth game mode called PHRASE. Type anything more than a single word — "GOOD MORNING", "I LOVE YOU", "MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB" — and SpellSynth speaks the whole phrase through whichever vintage voice you've picked. The VFD cycles one word at a time as the audio progresses, so reading along is natural.
Two ways to type:
• KEYPAD — the familiar yellow A-Z grid, now with a SPACE key. Each letter still plays on tap; SPACE silently separates words. Works with MIDI keyboards too.
• TYPE — for paste, dictation, or the iOS keyboard. Tap the field, type a phrase, hit SAY.
Twelve preset phrases come baked in — greetings ("HELLO WORLD", "GOOD MORNING"), early-reading sentences ("THE CAT IS HERE", "I CAN READ"), old-computer-movie callouts ("SYSTEM ONLINE", "GAME OVER"). Tap any chip to play it. Phrases you've played save in a RECENT row for the rest of the session.
All vintage voices work on phrases, though each has its own character at sentence length. 1986 DECTALK STYLE sounds the most natural — DECtalk itself was built for sentences. 1978 LPC keeps the Speak & Spell buzz but smooths word boundaries (the TI chip was tuned for sub-second utterances). 1968 ODYSSEY's deliberately slow 1.6× cadence makes phrases feel measured.
In the AUv3 plugin: the voice mode (RAW vs 1978 LPC) used to be a knob buried in the MIDI panel. It's now a dedicated VOICE segmented picker, sitting above PITCH where you'd actually look for it. Saved presets and host automation still resolve to the same parameter — nothing breaks.
A small note from me: SpellSynth is still a one-person side project I keep poking at on weekends. If you've got an idea, hit a bug, or just want to say hi, zhiii0x@gmail.com is the fastest way to reach me — replies go to my own inbox, not a queue. And if SpellSynth has made you smile even once, a quick App Store review goes a long way for a one-person shop.
— Zhi
版本1.2.0
開發者Chih Han Lin表明App的私隱慣例或包括下列資料的處理。詳情請參閲 開發者的私隱政策 。
