Fans of the film ‘2001 a Space Odyssey’ will no doubt recall the polite yet sinister voice of HAL, the ship’s computer. It stands to reason that all proper robots need a (not necessarily menacing) voice.

Those of you who imagine that a voice box would require a whole heap of ICs are mistaken; the ISD2500 ChipCorder family of ICs from Winbond contains almost all the necessary hardware in a single IC to record and playback audio messages.