Speak (Unix)

Short description: Unix utility

speakOriginal author(s)| Douglas McIlroy

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Developer(s)| AT&T Bell Laboratories
Initial release| February 1973; 53 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.

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]

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 M. Douglas McIlroy (March 1974). "Synthetic English speech by rule". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 14 (S1): S55–S56. doi:10.1121/1.1919804. Bibcode: 1974ASAJ...55R..55M.
2. ↑ McIlroy, M. D. (1974). ﻿Synthetic speech by rule﻿ (Report). Bell Telephone Laboratories technical report. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/pubs.html.
3. ↑ "UNIX® on the Game Boy Advance". http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/gbaunix/.
4. ↑ "[TUHS speak.c, or sometimes the bits are under your nose"]. http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2011-December/002538.html.
5. ↑ "[TUHS speak.c, or sometimes the bits are under your nose"]. http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2011-December/002550.html.
6. ↑ "[TUHS speak.c, or sometimes the bits are under your nose"]. http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2011-December/002546.html.
7. ↑ "The Unix Tree". 24 November 1981. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl.
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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