Memories of a goofy phone from the late 80s(rachelbythebay.com)
rachelbythebay.com
Memories of a goofy phone from the late 80s
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/09/20/fv1000/
13 comments
I found this terrible commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYheRAPnVkA
"Touch tone dialing was a breakthrough. With push buttons, you could dial numbers quickly. [long pause to change the subject] Introducing the FV1000, a revolutionary voice activated telephone from Southwestern Bell Freedom Phone."
"Touch tone dialing was a breakthrough. With push buttons, you could dial numbers quickly. [long pause to change the subject] Introducing the FV1000, a revolutionary voice activated telephone from Southwestern Bell Freedom Phone."
Sounds like... "you could dial numbers quickly. Not anymore: introducing..."
A quick Startpage search led to some very cool photos. It might be a terrible phone, but at least it's pretty. This thing has "Techmoan" written all over it.
I saw my first mobile in '91. A super on a jobsite had it, company-provided. It looked like a Vietnam War walkie-talkie. He said it had about 5 minutes of talk time, but was worth it. It seemed hokey to me at the time.
Here's its alternate universe version - https://skysedge.com/unsmartphones/RUSP/index.html
My family didn't have this phone, but the description of the janky voice recognition, timeframe, and current-day obscurity reminds me of the Texas Instruments Voyager edutainment headset (kind of a pain to search for because TI currently has a "Voyage" calculator family that people routinely misspell as "Voyager"). It combined speech synthesis and voice recognition, and I think you were supposed to follow along with each cartridge-based program in a booklet (which I'm not sure I ever had). The only really distinct memory I have of it is that you could change the voice to one of several presets and it would ask in each voice "to sound like this?".
The phone was from the 80's: it is possible the voice recognition was a single chip solution from TI - they did other specialised ICs. If so multiple devices could have the same voice recognition. Or maybe a firmware solution for a TI processor?
I did a quick search, but finding data sheets from the 80's without knowing the part number is difficult. I tried to find a schematic for the FV-1000 but no luck there either.
I did a quick search, but finding data sheets from the 80's without knowing the part number is difficult. I tried to find a schematic for the FV-1000 but no luck there either.
Reminds me of the "Cinco Phone" skit from Tim and Eric.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG8ZKwaC1jY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG8ZKwaC1jY
Wow, that describes a better voice dialing experience than the piece-of-shit system in my 2016 Nissan.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/254811165013