Before starting Artic Technologies the founders worked together in the Research & Development group of VOTRAX, a pioneering company in speech synthesis since the early 1970s. Back then, speech synthesizers were built from scratch using hundreds of components and sometimes requiring several circuit boards in a case as big as a bread box. This size was eventually reduced down to a single 24 pin chip known as the SC02 (now called the 263) chip. While at Votrax the founders worked together on many ground breaking projects of the time including...

* Speech devices for computers of the day (including S100 bus ,TRS-80, Atari, etc.)
* The original Handi-Voice (the first portable communicator for non-verbal users)
* The SC01 and SC02 (renamed 263) phoneme synthesizer chips.
* Type N' Talk (external speech device, computer interfaceable)
* PSS - Personal Speech System (external speech device, computer interfaceable)
* Collaborated with various sound Artists such as:
o Sound Effects creator for the movie "TRON"
o German Electronic Music group "Kraftwerk"

Heh...