SAM (speech synthesizer)
More info
- Creator
- Mark Barton
- Released
- Publisher
- Don't Ask Software
- Type
- Software speech synthesizer
- Platform
- Apple II, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit
A speech synthesizer done entirely in software from 1982 — the robot voice that became the home computer's standard sound for "the computer speaks".
SAM, Software Automatic Mouth, was written by Mark Barton and published by Don't Ask Software in 1982, first for the Apple II and then the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit. The point was that it needed no extra hardware: the synthesis was computed on the CPU from a description of formants and phonemes, on machines with a few kilobytes to spare.
With the companion program Reciter you could feed in ordinary English text and let SAM guess the pronunciation, giving that characteristically clipped, nasal voice. It became a fixture of early games and demos and outlived its hardware era by decades — modern JavaScript ports of this very engine still run in browsers.