Abstract: A system for measuring the distance to an object and orally announcing the measured distance by use of a speech synthesizer. The system includes a transmitter, a receiver, and a transmit/receive transducer operating at an ultrasonic frequency. The round trip time from generation of impulse to receipt of the echo reflected from an object is measured using a counter. The counter directly accesses a memory that contains the information needed to select the correct combination of words to be synthesized for the corresponding measured distance. The required vocabulary producing natural sounding speech is stored in a second memory within the speech synthesizer.