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Before I talk about each issue in some detail let me again jump to the conclusion: We listened to him very carefully and then ignored his ultimate recommendation. Actually we went beyond just ignoring his recommendations, we also chose not to tell our management about the recommendation. We had already overcome the technical community’s conclusion that the product was impossible to create, so this recommendation seemed easy to ignore. Of course this is not a fair summary of our interaction with Dr. Kottmeyer. In the end he made significant suggestions on how to overcome the technical constraints in order to make the Speak N Spell educationally sound. Now let's look at each of the issues in more detail.
The technology we knew how to use for the display was Vacuum Florescent (VF). It produced a green display that was bright enough to read in most lighting conditions which gave the product good readability for the user. It also matched our IC technology well, and could do a 16 segment alpha numeric display without breaking our cost goal. But, it was all capitals with no hope of lower case letters. We actually spent time attempting to create a lower case 16 segment VF display with no success. That meant we were stuck with an all capital letter display. Figure 1 shows the display we used.
The issue that Dr. Kottmeyer had with an all capital display was that children don’t learn to spell with all capital letters. In fact, they would actually be misspelling the words. The example he used was that even the letter “I” couldn’t be spelled correctly. I found that funny as it was the only word that I could think about that would be spelled correctly. But his point was well taken. It was a concern we would need to suffer through and let the market decide whether it was a real issue or not.
When we added this issue of having only capital letters for the student to use, to the issue of the synthetic speech, perhaps teaching the students improper pronunciation, we had reason to be concerned about the educational value of Speak N Spell. But, there were more issues.
The configuration of the keyboard was an issue that neither our expert nor we had a strong opinion on. It came down to whether we would put the keyboard in alphabetical order or in “QWERTY” format. The argument for the "QWERTY" format was that the student would also learn the basics of typing while learning to spell. The advantage of the alphabetic order of keys is that it would reinforce the student's learning the alphabet. It would also remind the students of the vowels. We chose to discount the "QWERTY" format as it would allow bad habits to be formed which would interfere with the student later learning the proper way to type. Figure 2 is a picture of the keyboard configuration we used. If a question comes to mind, "why is the keyboard is in a 4 by 10 format?", you only need to look inside of one of the first year products to understand. To keep the cost down we chose to use two standard calculator keyboards side by side rather than create a specially configured single keyboard. Later generations of the whole "Speak and . . ." moved to a flat keyboard integrated into the keyboard bezel to fix a reliability issue with the original keyboard. It was also found to be a lower cost solution, although it didn't give the tactile response of the original keyboard.
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