chipspeech, created by audio software company Plogue Art et Technologie, Inc. and launched in early 2015, is a speech synthesizer that captures the voices of vintage vocal synths for the use in music. It currently comes with twelve voices, all based off of various historic voice synthesizers, such as the Votrax SC-01 and DECtalk.
Similar to Vocaloid, chipspeech uses character avatars to represent the voices, each with their own canon backstory. However, while the official product page defines their basic backstories, their official Twitter accounts flesh out the characters extensively, giving each character their own storylines. In addition, Twitter users can also interact with these accounts and ask them questions.
The product page can be found here
, which provides the basic information for all of the released chipspeech voices.
The Chipspeech Twitter accounts:
chipspeech contains examples of:
- Ambiguous Gender: Dee Klatt, whose gender isn't truly known and constantly switches between masculine and feminine disguises, though it is implied that they don't identify with any gender.
- Amnesia Episode: Dandy lost his memory of everything after the Victorian era, possibly due to Otto having messed with his memories in the past.
- Character Blog: The chipspeech Twitter accounts, where most of the canon is made. Additionally, Dandy, Dee, Dr. Cidertalk and Vosim all have Tumblr blogs.
- Evil Former Friend: Dandy and Dr. Cidertalk were once employees and friends of Otto when Otto was still a non-augmented human.
- Expy: Dr. Cidertalk's voice was sourced from the original 1984 release of Macintalk. No guesses as to who he's based on.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: As a prototype companion android who has spent most of his life in the wasteland, Vosim's main motivation is to have friends.
- Mad Scientist: Otto Mozer
- Dr. Cidertalk has elements of this as well, his company creating such products as surgically implanted mp3 players.
- Dr. Cidertalk has elements of this as well, his company creating such products as surgically implanted mp3 players
- Master of Disguise: Dee Klatt has many disguises on hand out of necessity since they are on the run from the police.
- Notably, they have successfully disguised theirself as Dandy.
- Notably, they have successfully disguised theirself as Dandy.
- Official Couple: Dandy and Dr. Cidertalk before Dandy's memories were wiped, as well as Dee and Vosim before the two split.
- Synthetic Voice Actor
- Ten Minutes in the Closet: Dandy attempts this with Dee and Vosim by locking them in a closet and giving them a USB cord, but accidentally locks Bert's pet lizards in there as well. He decides that filling the closet up with water is a good idea, even though there are two androids in the room.
- The Dandy: Dandy 704, who believes himself to be very fashionable and shows an interest in fashion.
