Musical greeting cards for birthdays and other parties are a true classic, though they've lost some popularity to digital solutions. However, the people at Olympus tried to expand the idea of combining voice, music, and paper with their ScanTalk system in the late 1990s. Basically, users could create small strips with voices, natural sounds, or music, stick them onto books, documents, catalogs, and photo albums, and play back their contents with a dedicated device at any time.
Recording our voice is as simple as opening an app on a mobile device, or using the built-in microphone on a laptop. Of course, there are quality details each user will have to sort out for themselves, but it's not complicated to make a basic recording. That's possible thanks to spectacular improvements in miniaturization, mass storage, and compression algorithms. Now... things were not always like that. Back then, devices were neither as mobile nor as compact, portable storage cost an arm and a leg (and more), and any intention to 'dump' content to the cloud went nowhere due to marked limits in connectivity and speed. Manufacturers were forced to be a bit more 'creative', so to speak, and in the late 1990s, the people at Olympus presented this in Japan:
Olympus ScanTalk: Recording Voice and Music on Paper
What we're seeing in action is the Olympus ScanTalk system. According to available information, ScanTalk was launched on the Japanese market in autumn 1998, backed by a large advertising campaign in various media. Olympus ScanTalk was split into two: on one hand, the LP100 thermal transfer printer with a maximum speed of 32 millimeters per second and an audio buffer of 16 seconds (several Epson printers added ScanTalk support later). And on the other, there were two variants of personal readers: the R200 with a pen shape and earphone, and the R300 with built-in speaker that debuted a year later. In essence, both readers worked like a handheld scanner that 'read' the contents of the audio strips. The printer's buffer limit only allowed recording short messages, but the alternative was installing Sound Print Studio software on a compatible computer.
The potential of the Olympus ScanTalk platform was enormous for the era. Interactive manuals, menus for the blind, hospital records, advertising... anything that could receive an adhesive label was within reach. However, the company decided to discontinue all four products (printer, readers, and software) in November 2001. Existing stock remained on sale until March 2007, and repair services ended in September of that year. Six years of additional support for a retired product? Where do we sign?
