Glasses for the blind might sound like an odd idea, given the traditional purpose of glasses and the issue of vision impairment. However, eighth-grade student [Akhil Nagori] built these glasses with an alternate purpose in mind. They’re not really for seeing. Instead, they’re outfitted with hardware to capture text and read it aloud.

Yes, we’re talking about real-time text-to-audio transcription, built into a head-worn format. The hardware is pretty straightforward: a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W runs off a battery and is outfitted with the usual first-party camera. The camera is mounted on a set of eyeglass frames so that it points at whatever the wearer might be “looking” at. At the push of a button, the camera captures an image, and then passes it to an API which does the optical character recognition. The text can then be passed to a speech synthesizer so it can be read aloud to the wearer.

It’s funny to think about how advanced this project really is. Jump back to the dawn of the microcomputer era, and such a device would have been a total flight of fancy—something a researcher might make a PhD and career out of. Indeed, OCR and speech synthesis alone were challenge enough. Today, you can stand on the shoulders of giants and include such mighty capability in a homebrewed device that cost less than $50 to assemble. It’s a neat project, too, and one that we’re sure taught [Akhil] many valuable skills along the way.

Talking computers are nothing these days. But in the old days, a computer that could speak was quite the novelty. Many computers from the 1970s and 1980s used an AY-3-8910 chip and [InazumaDenki] has been playing with one of these venerable chips. You can see (and hear) the results in the video below.

The chip uses PCM, and there are different ways to store and play sounds. The video shows how different they are and even looks at the output on the oscilloscope. The chip has three voices and was produced by General Instruments, the company that initially made PIC microcontrollers. It found its way into many classic arcade games, home computers, and games like Intellivision, Vectrex, the MSX, and ZX Spectrum. Soundcards for the TRS-80 Color Computer and the Apple II used these chips. The Atari ST used a variant from Yamaha, the YM2149F.

There’s some code for an ATmega, and the video says it is part one, so we expect to see more videos on this chip soon.

General instruments had other speech chips and some of them are still around in emulated form. In fact, you can emulate the AY-3-8910 with little more than a Raspberry Pi Pico.