Bruce Abbott |
01 January 2024 00:16 |
Interesting podcast interview with Mark Burton (creator of SAM) in 2020.
"Mark Burton: ...we were starting to do a German version, then when they started putting text to speech systems into Windows, as a standard thing for free - that was bad... we were done".
"ANTIC: The SoftVoice text to speech website is still up, but it looks like it hasn't been updated for a long time, and ... nobody responds to those emails.
Mark Burton: No, nobody does... I believe he kept that open - and he kept the SoftVoice corporation alive - for medical insurance purposes."
"ANTIC: A few years ago... somebody reverse-engineered SAM, figured out it worked, and then ported it to C. And there's a couple of versions of that online... exactly like SAM.
Mark Burton: Yeah, it's pretty exact - I've heard that."
"Mark Burton: We asked Steve Jobs, do you want an exclusive - and he said no, [he] didn't care if we licensed it to others. So that was great because right then the Amiga came into existence, and they wanted the same thing. So Macintalk on the Mac is narrator on the Amiga - it's pretty much the exact same software.... and we actually collected a royalty per Amiga sold - so that was a nice ongoing revenue stream for a while..."
discordier / sam
Quote:
This is a vanilla Javascript port of the Text-To-Speech (TTS) software SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) for the Commodore C64 published in the year 1982 by Don't Ask Software (now SoftVoice, Inc.).
It is based on the adaption to C by Stefan Macke and the refactorings by Vidar Hokstad and 8BitPimp
It includes a Text-To-Phoneme converter called reciter and a Phoneme-To-Speech routine for the final output.
It aims for low memory impact and file size...
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vidarh / SAM
Quote:
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. On my computer it takes less than 39KB (much smaller on embedded devices as the executable-overhead is not necessary) of disk space and is a fully stand alone program. For immediate output it uses the SDL-library, otherwise it can save .wav files.
Adaption To C
This program was converted semi-automatic into C by converting each assembler opcode...
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.
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Drawing speech: Software Automatic Mouth
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