SAM Software Automatic Mouth

What is SAM?

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 which is the reason I want to avoid the Emscripten conversion by Stefan (which weights about 414kb).

For further details, refer to retrobits.net

Some analytics of S.A.M. in general can be found in Artyom Skrobov's (@tyomitch) blog who also provided pretty insightful PRs. Visit his blog https://habr.com/ru/post/500764/ (russian) or the google translated version here.

Usage

Require the module via yarn: yarn add sam-js

Use it in your program:

import SamJs from 'sam-js';

let sam = new SamJs();

// Play "Hello world" over the speaker.
// This returns a Promise resolving after playback has finished.
sam.speak('Hello world');

// Generate a wave file containing "Hello world" and download it.
sam.download('Hello world');

// Render the passed text as 8bit wave buffer array (Uint8Array).
const buf8 = sam.buf8('Hello world');

// Render the passed text as 32bit wave buffer array (Float32Array).
const buf32 = sam.buf32('Hello world');

Typical voice values

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

Original docs.

I have bundled a copy of the original manual in this repository, see the manual file in the docs directory.

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 I cannot put my code under any specific open source software license Use it at your own risk.

Contact

If you have questions don' t hesitate to ask me. If you discovered some new knowledge about the code please file an issue.