Tutorial C64 SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) as Text2Speech in armbian

[guidol]

Maybe someone does know the old/historical SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) speech synthesizer for the Commodore 64?

 

Today I did found the github-page with the source-code and compiled it on my Orange Pi R1 - using armbian

 

For compiling the default SDL-version I had to install the 2 additional packages with apt

- libsdl1.2-dev 

- libsdl1.2debian

before SAM did compile on armbian.

 

I also did try libsdl2-2.0.0 (and -dev), but this didnt worked well while compiling

 

The souce-code could be found at:

https://github.com/s-macke/SAM

 

Hear here, how this OLD speech synthesizer sounds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm4ZCGgzeeU

 

 

Test him ONLINE:
https://simulationcorner.net/index.php?page=sam

 

Or read about him in the Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth

[guidol]

Tested SAM again and here some infos for compile and usage ( if you have a "late switching" amplifier on your SBC) :

If you want to use direct output via sdl instead of generating .wav / using aplay the .wav
( libsdl2-2.0-0 libsdl2-dev doenst work with SAM ):
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
apt install libsdl1.2-dev libsdl1.2debian

wget https://github.com/s-macke/SAM/archive/master.zip -O SAM_original_master.zip
unzip SAM_original_master.zip
cd SAM-master

edit flags in Makefile if you want to use of Non-SDL (and save 30MB download and 300MB on HDD)

make


./sam 'Hello, how do you do?'
./sam -wav sam_ouput.wav 'Hello, how do you do?' && aplay ./sam_output.wav

Creating a empty .wav for activating the amplifier:
---------------------------------------------------
./sam -wav /home/guido/SAM-master/sam_empty.wav ''
 
Shell-Script waiting for audio-amplifier to be ready:
-----------------------------------------------------

# Non-SDL sam_amp_nonsdl.sh
# ========================================
./sam -wav /tmp/sam_output.wav $1
aplay /home/guido/SAM-master/sam_empty.wav 2> /dev/null
sleep 1
aplay /tmp/sam_output.wav 2> /dev/null
rm /tmp/sam_output.wav
# ========================================

OR

# SDL sam_amp_sdl.sh
# ========================================
aplay /home/guido/SAM-master/sam_empty.wav 2> /dev/null
sleep 1
./sam $1
# ========================================


Examples:
------------------------------------------
./sam_amp_nonsdl.sh 'My name is SAM'
./sam_amp_sdl.sh 'My name is SAM'