Software Automatic Mouth
|
|
Software Automatic Mouth, or S.A.M., was a speech synthesis program for the early personal computers, developed and sold by a company called "Don't Ask Software" (now SoftVoice).
The program was available for Apple computers (including Apple II, and the Lisa), various Atari models and the Commodore 64. Prices ranged from about $50–$200.
S.A.M. is claimed to have been the first commercial software voice synthesis program. Its greatest competition was Voice Box by Alien Software. It is a distant ancestor of Apple PlainTalk, found in today's Mac OS.
This is a sample sound clip, of the Commodore 64 version of S.A.M. saying the following sentence: "This is a test of the Software Automatic Mouth for Commodore 64.": OGG sound clip
External links
- SoftVoice, Inc. (http://www.text2speech.com/welcome.html) — Corporate web site
- Speech Synthesizers for Atari and Apple (http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/davies/mvatappl.html) — Magazine review
- Spelling.SAM (http://www.cyberroach.com/analog/an22/spelling_sam.htm) — A BASIC spelling program for Commodore 64
- S.A.M. manual (http://retrobits.net/sam.html) — Reproduction of the manual for the Atari version