Here's the thing: I really didn't want a separate chip for speech synthesis, and true TTS would be overkill for what I'm building. This uses an Arduino C++ library modified for the Pico, based on the original work by Peter Knight. It's honestly the coolest thing ever.

I spent about 8 hours on this - not really on the conversion itself, but because I initially tried (and failed) to create a phoneme-based true text-to-speech program for the Pico 2. After struggling with that approach, I stumbled upon Peter's library and thought "Perfect! Why shouldn't I have 1980s-style robotic voice on my 2025-era tricorder?"

I created a fun demo to show it off and will be posting the code to the open source GitHub. It has many words pre-loaded and does a nice little demo with the correct vintage lookup tables.

The Integration Challenge Here's the interesting part: I have the thermal imaging module working, but it's in CircuitPython while this Talkie code is C++ only. So I'll be doing what I needed to do anyway - converting all the code from CircuitPython to C++. This should make for a more stable device with higher performance as well.

Once that module is converted, I'll have a medical mode for the imager that will tell you exactly what temperature it sees (in Fahrenheit) and whether there's cause for concern. Yes - a real-life talking medical thermal scanning module.

Smart Voice Alerts I'm planning to expand the speech to other sensor data, but I'm limiting most voice alerts to real concerns like:

• "High level of radiation detected"
• "Storm approaching in 30 minutes, seek shelter"
• "One hour from sunset, time to make base camp"

The idea is ATLAS can stay in my backpack continuously scanning and only speak up when something important happens. I don't want it to be an annoying chatterbox.

Here's the demo of the talking code: Talkie_Med_Demo https://github.com/thedocdoc/AI-Field-Analyzer/tree/main