Speak (Unix)

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. It was first included in Unix v3 and possibly later ones, with the OS-end support files and help files persisting until v6. As of late 2011, the original source code for speak, and portions of speak.m (which is generated from speak.v) were discovered. At least three versions of the man page are known to still exist.

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