Sam is a very small Text-To-Speech (TTS) program written in C, that runs on most popular platforms. It is an adaption to C of the speech software SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) for the Commodore C64 published in the year 1982 by Don't Ask Software (now SoftVoice, Inc.). It includes a Text-To-Phoneme converter called reciter and a Phoneme-To-Speech routine for the final output. It is so small that it will work also on embedded computers.
I created this project with the intention to provide SAM as Arduino Library which supports different output alternatives:
You can download the library as zip and call include Library -> zip library. Or you can git clone this project into the Arduino libraries folder e.g. with
cd ~/Documents/Arduino/libraries
git clone pschatzmann/SAM.git
- class documentation for the Arduino API
- supported Phonemes
- the original Readme
- the manual of the equivalent Apple II program
Voices can be defined by setting the speed, pitch, throat and moth parameters:
DESCRIPTION SPEED PITCH THROAT MOUTH
Elf 72 64 110 160
Little Robot 92 60 190 190
Stuffy Guy 82 72 110 105
Little Old Lady 82 32 145 145
Extra-Terrestrial 100 64 150 200
SAM 72 64 128 128
You can try out some alternative parameter combinations here.
The autput format is as follows:
- bits per sample: 16
- sample rate: 22050
- channels: 1
You can change the channels to 2 by calling sam.setOutputChannels(2);
| Memory Type | Used |
|---|---|
| Progmem | 225'000 |
| Dynamic Memory | 14'000 |
The requirements have been determined by compiling the project with an ESP32. The values are rounded up!
The software is a reverse-engineered version of a commercial software published more than 30 years ago. The current copyright holder is SoftVoice, Inc. (www.text2speech.com)
Any attempt to contact the company failed. The website was last updated in the year 2009. The status of the original software can therefore best described as Abandonware (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware)
As long this is the case we cannot put the code under any specific open source software license: Use it at your own risk.