The Acorn Speech Synthesiser upgrade consisted of two chips that could be plugged directly into the BBC Micro motherboard and an optionally fitted ROM socket to expand the speech system with other voices.

Of the two chips that were fitted to the motherboard, one was a Texas Instruments TMS5220 and a TMS6100 phrase ROM or PHROM for short. The TMS6100 carried the sampled words and part words of the then BBC News anchor Kenneth Kendall and is remarkably good considering the age of the synthesiser technology involved.