Years ago, I experimented with a speech synthesiser for the Commodore 64. You used it the typical Commodore way: open a channel to the device, print command codes to the channel. Something like OPEN 3,12,1: PRINT#3, "H0E1L0O3 W0E4R1L0D0";: CLOSE 3 would be the obvious first step (I'm making up the details, but it gives you the idea). One funny thing was that, if you forgot the semi-colon at the end of the PRINT# command, you got an "nnnn" noise at the end of every statement. Why? Because all ASCII characters had associated sounds with the synthesiser, and the end of line character, which the semi-colon suppresses in a print statement, was mapped to the sound of the letter N.

Decades later, totally different technology, and you brought up that memory. Plus ça change and all that.