# s-macke/SAM

Software Automatic Mouth - Tiny Speech Synthesizer

Repository: https://github.com/s-macke/SAM
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/s-macke-sam
Language: C
License Family: other
Topics: speech-synthesis, c64, phonemes, reciter
Last push: 2024-06-10T13:47:49+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 32/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4860, "days_push": 814, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases, no_license
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1497, forks 335 (observed 2026-08-28T04:04:53.778852+00:00)

## What it is
SAM (Software Automatic Mouth) is a tiny text-to-speech synthesizer written in C, adapted from the 1982 Commodore 64 speech software. It includes a text-to-phoneme converter (reciter) and a phoneme-to-speech routine, outputting via SDL or to .wav files.

## Use cases
- generate speech from text on embedded devices
- add retro robotic voice effects to a project
- convert text to wav audio files from the command line
- study how a classic 1980s speech synthesizer works
- make a C64-style talking program on modern platforms

## When to choose
- you need an extremely small, dependency-light TTS engine
- you want the nostalgic retro robotic speech sound
- you need TTS that runs on embedded or resource-constrained hardware

## When to avoid
- you need natural, modern-sounding speech synthesis
- you need a maintained library with a license and active development
- you need neural network-based TTS quality

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: maintenance
- function: tts, speech-recognition, audio-processing
- domain: speech-processing, embedded-systems
- platform: windows, cross-platform, embedded, cli
- tags: text-to-speech, retro-computing, c64, phonemes, reciter, tiny-footprint, wav-output, sdl, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- s-macke/SAM (main) score 32

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:53.778852+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T04:33:10.490871+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/s-macke/SAM (fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:53.778852+00:00, sha 14ff20bc8646)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.