Speak (Unix)

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speak
Original author(s) Douglas McIlroy
Developer(s) AT&T Bell Laboratories
Initial releaseFebruary 1973;50 years ago (1973-02)
Operating system Unix and Unix-like
Type Command

speak was a Unix utility that used a predefined set of rules to turn a file of English text into phoneme data compatible with a Federal Screw Works (later Votrax) model VS4 "Votrax" Speech Synthesizer. [1] [2] It was first included in Unix v3 [3] and possibly later ones, with the OS-end support files and help files persisting until v6. As of late 2011, the original source code [4] [5] for speak, and portions of speak.m (which is generated from speak.v) [6] were discovered. At least three [7] [8] [9] versions of the man page are known to still exist.

Contents

The main program (speak) was around 4500 bytes, [1] the rule tables (/etc/speak.m) were around 11,000 bytes, [1] and the table viewer (speakm) [10] was around 1900 bytes. [1]

History

The speak utility was developed by Douglas McIlroy in the early 1970s at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was included with the 1st Edition of Unix in 1973. In 1974, McIlroy published a paper describing the workings of this algorithm. [1]

According to the McIlroy paper, [1] "K. Thompson and D. M. Ritchie integrated the device smoothly into the operating system", which is evident from /usr/sys/dev/vs.c "Screw Works Interface via DC-11".

McIlroy Algorithm

The McIlroy Algorithm is a large set of rules, sub-rules, and sub-sub-rules, applied to a word to isolate long vowels, silent 'e's, and slowly convert each letter into its "Screw Works" equivalent phoneme code. [11] The intention of the algorithm is to convert any English text into Votrax Phoneme codes, which could be played back/recited by a Federal Screw Works "Votrax" speech synthesizer.

A later (1976), simpler text-to-speech algorithm developed jointly by Votrax and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, known as the "NRL Algorithm", serves a similar purpose.[ citation needed ]

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 M. Douglas McIlroy (March 1974). "Synthetic English speech by rule". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 14 (S1): S55–S56. Bibcode:1974ASAJ...55R..55M. doi: 10.1121/1.1919804 .
  2. ↑ McIlroy, M. D. (1974). Synthetic speech by rule (Report). Bell Telephone Laboratories technical report.
  3. ↑ "UNIX® on the Game Boy Advance". www.kernelthread.com.
  4. ↑ "[TUHS] speak.c, or sometimes the bits are under your nose". Archived from the original on June 20, 2014.
  5. ↑ "[TUHS] speak.c, or sometimes the bits are under your nose". minnie.tuhs.org. Archived from the original on June 20, 2014.
  6. ↑ "[TUHS] speak.c, or sometimes the bits are under your nose". minnie.tuhs.org. Archived from the original on June 20, 2014.
  7. ↑ "The Unix Tree". minnie.tuhs.org. November 24, 1981. Retrieved December 31, 2023.
  8. ↑ The Unix Tree minnie.tuhs.org
  9. ↑ The Unix Tree minnie.tuhs.org
  10. ↑ The Unix Tree minnie.tuhs.org
  11. ↑ The Unix Tree minnie.tuhs.org
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