Currah
UK business
Currah was a British computer peripheral manufacturer, famous mainly for the speech synthesis ROM cartridges it designed for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and other 8-bit home computers of the 1980s.
Currah μSource for the ZX Spectrum
The Currah μSource, commonly referred to as the Microsource, from Quadhouse is a self-contained ROM cartridge with a full-function-two-pass macro assembler, Forth and a debugger, all of which can interact with BASIC. It is also compatible with Interface 1.
Currah μSpeech for the ZX Spectrum
The Currah μSpeech, commonly referred to as the Microspeech, plugged into the expansion port on the back of the ZX Spectrum. Additional leads were provided to feed the sound and UHF signal from the computer into the unit. The TV aerial lead plugged into the unit and speech sounds were added into the UHF signal generated by computer.
By default, the unit "spoke" every key-press the user made, even the direction keys which came out as "CURSOR". This could be controlled by a reserved variable KEYS. Typing
LET KEYS=0
would turn this feature off.
Programming speech
Specific words and phrases could be spoken by assigning a value to the reserved string variable S$. This was interpreted letter-by-letter unless brackets were used to denote other allophones. A simple example would be "(dth)is", (dth) representing the voiced dental fricative /ð/.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Currah” as uK business. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as uK business. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4036780. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Currah” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.