SAM - Software Automatic Mouth - Tiny Speech Synthesizer - Arduino Library

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:

• Output with a callback method
• Output to a Arduino Stream

Installation

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

Documentation

• class documentation for the Arduino API
• supported Phonemes
• the original Readme
• the manual of the equivalent Apple II program

Voices

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.

Output Format

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 Requirements

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!

License

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.