The VIOS board is a voice I/O system controller. It was designed to give the Gemini robots speech, music and sound effects capability and to allow complete control of the robot with voice commands. The VIOS computer includes voice recognition, voice

synthesis, music synthesis and sound effect generation circuits.

The VIOS connects to the main robot computer via an RS-232 serial port. Using a terminal program you can command VIOS to speak, play music, generate sound effects and display voice recognition tokens. It could even sing and accompany itself with music since the speech synthesizer and sound synthesizer were two different chips. The VIOS computer was also designed to be a stand alone product. It can be installed in a case and used the same as any computer peripheral.

Here is are the schematics of the complete VIOS board in two parts, vios1.pdf and vios2.pdf.

Here is a picture of the bare pc board.