In the 1980s, if you wanted your 8-bit micro to talk, you bought an allophone-based board built around chips like the SP0256, not the far more polished DECtalk voice that Stephen Hawking later made famous. Software engineer Michael Wessel has now closed that gap with Perfect Paul ][, a card that drops DECtalk-style speech into an Apple II.

The board is built around an RP2040 microcontroller, a Raspberry Pi Pico, paired with an I2S DAC, an amplifier, a speaker and the logic needed to sit on the Apple II's bus. It occupies a fixed block of memory addresses, so software can talk to it the same way Apple II programs have always talked to peripherals: by POKEing values straight into memory.

Wessel published the project, including the hardware design, on GitHub under the name perfect-paul-ii. Hackaday says a demo video shows the card singing convincingly. Real, standalone DECtalk hardware has appeared in Hackaday coverage before, including a 2019 piece on an original unit crooning old songs. Wessel's card is the first to offer that voice as a plug-in accessory for 40-year-old home computers.