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The signal that was generate from the speech synthesizer was integrated with the standard Intellivision data bus using other components of the Intellivoice - an interface chip as well as an amplifier. The result was games designed for the Intellivoice took advantage of the extra hardware, and those that didn't would simply ignore it. Plugging a voice-enabled game directly into the master component (bypassing the speech synthesis hardware), worked as well - however you lost and voice generated by the game. In general, this rendered the games virtually unplayable.
Voice editing was crucial, since each game cartridge could only hold 4 to 8K of voice data. Words had to be digitized at the lowest possible sampling rate at which they could be understood; often, the sampling rate would be changed three or four times within the same word - lower for vowels, higher for consonants - to save space.
Despite these space-saving efforts, the number of words that could be fit into a voice game was extremely limited, which probably contributed to the Intellivoice's failure. While orders for the initial voice game releases were around 300,000 each, orders for the fourth game, TRON Solar Sailer, released later, hit only 90,000.
A restyled Intellivoice, designed to match the Intellivision II, appeared in the January 1983 Mattel Electronics catalog; a working prototype, however, was never built. The module shown in the catalog was merely a carved and painted block of wood.
==Hardware==
