I had to learn how to use that in the military, used to call it crashinal rose

That laugh still haunts me. Also the SAM application for text to speech which was pretty good for the era

Oh man that unlocked a memory of some attempts I heard of voices through PC Speaker that weren’t bad but definitely weren’t great lol

Nice I couldn’t imagine playing music on my c64’s 1541 drive the thing made scary knocking noises when it worked properly!

How quickly we forget the chip tunes of the PC Speaker, I used it in a computer lab one day to play a nearly undetectable high freq wave using logo. The PC Speaker was a pretty flexible little speaker

My favorite project was around 6 years ago when my former employer was looking to modernize the customer service automation experience with AI, it started with a round the US tour of going to the HQ’s of 4 big tech companies in the space(IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Google at the time) as part of an investigatory team. We were to select what we thought would be the best engine to run conversational AI in our applications, during that time we were also given greenfield to write a modern framework apart from our existing technology to leverage it. Over the course of a year and a half we went from ideation to the creation of an omni-channel conversational framework that netted me and the team a patent, and allowed me to flex architecture skillset that lead me to my current role as a solution architect working with some of the same people at another better company. Definitely the most fun, exciting and rewarding project of mine to date.

I’ve run into this twice, both times I’ve had to deal with Microsoft Support for around 2-3 hours to resolve, shitty for a paying customer.