I remember "Rocman", how hearing a human voice coming from a 1-bit beeper sounded like sorcery: https://youtu.be/iuT0hxjLCzc?t=95

I remember the "Codemasters Jet Bike Simulator". I always found it impressive

(And there was a "Get ready!" which I didn't remember)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRW9vW3_M3o&t=8

Another Speccy game with digitized speech is Chase HQ:

https://youtu.be/yjrbcLm78I8?si=GMIqDdL31hq4ik72&t=87

Although tbf apparently that's done via the AY sound chip of the 128k, which is a lot easier than through the on/off beeper of the 48k since the AY can do digitized audio via CPU-driven volume modulation.

There was also "Meteor Storm":

https://spectrumgamesuk.com/index.php?game=Meteor-Storm

I think it said "Meteor Alert!" or something similar, though the quality was terrible.

You might be right! I had a copy of 'Slightly Magic' which had some speech synthesis. Great game. Never completed it though

The 128k version of Nodes of Yesod had some speech, albeit I think it was just the name of the game. My older brother told me a kid in his class got paid big bucks - like, I dunno, £50 or something? - for coding it. Almost certainly bollocks.

For high quality speech, you could get the Currah μSpeech! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currah#Currah_%CE%BCSpeech_for...

I swear there was one symbol it pronounced "flea bleep".

For some reason "5", even if constructed as phonemes came out as "frame" - I always wondered why. I've never seen it mentioned in the various short pieces about it online including its contemporary reviews. I wonder now if it was a bug in the particular rom I had and it was fixed early enough to not get much visibility.

Robocop was another game with sampled speach, not yet mentioned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy8kZcGz98U

There were a few games (in later years) with speach/audio. But Robocop was one that stands in my memory for the good music.

Jonah Barrington's Squash used synthesised speech for scores