ESS Tech

ESS Technologies was founded in 1983 as Electronic Speech Systems, by Professor Forrest Mozer, a space physicist at the University of California, Berkeley and Todd Mozer, Forrest Mozer's son, and Joe Costello, the former manager of National Semiconductors Digitalker line of talking chips. Costello left soon after the formation and started Cadence Designs with his former boss from National. Fred Chan VLSI designer and software engineer, in Berkeley, California, joined in 1985, and took over running the company in 1986 when Todd Mozer left for graduate school.

The company was created at least partially as a way to market Mozer's speech synthesis system after his contract with National Semiconductor expired in 1983 or so.

Electronic Speech Systems produced synthetic speech for, among other things, home computer systems like the Commodore 64. Within the hardware limitations of that time, ESS used Mozer's technology, in software, to produce realistic-sounding voices that often became the boilerplate for the respective games. Two popular sound bites from the Commodore 64 were "He slimed me!!" from Ghostbusters and Elvin Atombender's "Another visitor. Stay a while—stay forever!" in the original Impossible Mission.

At some point, the company moved from Berkeley to Fremont, California. Around that time, the company was renamed to ESS Technology.

Later, in 1994, Forrest Mozer's son Todd Mozer, an ESS employee, branched off and started his own company called Sensory Circuits Inc, later Sensory, Inc. to market speech recognition technology.In the mid-1990s, ESS started working on making PC audio, and later, video chips, and created the Audiodrive line, used in hundreds of different products. Audiodrive chips were at least nominally Creative Sound Blaster Pro compatible. Many Audiodrive chips also featured in-house developed, OPL3-compatible FM synthesizers . These synthesizers were often reasonably faithful to the Yamaha OPL3 chip, which was an important feature for the time as some competing solutions, including Creative's own CQM synthesis featured in later ISA Sound Blaster compatibles, offered sub-par FM sound quality. Some PCI-interface Audiodrives also provided legacy DOS compatibility through Distributed DMA and the SB-Link interface.In 2001 ESS acquired a small Kelowna design company run by Martin Mallinson and continues R&D operations in Kelowna. The Kelowna R&D Center developed the Sabre range of DAC and ADC products that are used in many audio systems and cell phones.