The IBM Personal Computer Co has two sound board adaptors, the Audiovation Adaptor and Audiovation Adaptor/A, to provide a key speech recognition application and digitally sampled MPC Level 2 sound for game enhancement. The Adaptors are offered with business applications that include a speech recognition program, Talk-To-Plus, which provides an alternative to mouse or keyboard input and a text-to-speech application, Monologue, which translates written text into spoken words for various applications. IBM also announced the Audiovation Multimedia Upgrade Kit, which includes the Audiovation AT compatible sound board and the IBM internal CD-Rom player. The Audiovation Adaptor is AT-compatible and contains a built-in interface for the IBM IDE internal CD-ROM player. The Audiovation Adaptor/A is compatible with Micro Channel Architecture. The Adaptors support applications written for the IBM M-Audio Capture and Playback adaptor, if they are written to the device driver interface. They operate in a Windows 3.1 environment with the MCI-MPC-2 audio drivers offering wavefile record and playback at sampling rates up to 44.1KHz in 8-bit and 16-bit mono and stereo. Users also can record and play 44.1KHz CD audio in 16-bit stereo and mix CD sound with wavefile playback. Offered separate from the adaptors, a Musical Instrument Digital Interface synthesiser uses sampled sound synthesis to provide musical instrument sound reproduction. The Audiovation MIDI Pac enables customers to play, edit and record music through the MIDI interface. The Mwave signal processor also supports applications that employ Qsound, which gives the Mwave MIDI synthesizer three-dimensional effects on ordinary stereo speakers. The system provides real-time 4:1 sound data compression to reduce storage requirements without sacrificing fidelity. Available now, the Audiovation Adapter costs $220, the Audiovation Adaptor/A is $260, the MIDI kit costs $80, and the multimedia upgrade kit is $600.
