Hacker News Reader

Early 80s (1982), according to Wikipedia:

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

That brings back some memories. My friend and I messed around with S.A.M. on his Atari 800 a lot when we were kids. We would crank call the parents of other kids we knew and have SAM tell them their kids had skipped school and might get suspended. It was funny to some twelve year olds anyway.

SAM had a basic mode where you just type English, but it also had an advanced phonetic input mode where you could control the sound and stress on every syllable. My favorite thing to do was try to give SAM a British accent.

> Commodore 64 had text to speech in late 80s.

Yes, and Windows had Narrator. And that's all. Since 20 years.

Test to speech it's trivial with Dr. Sbaitso or Flite in ARMv5/Pentium 90 machines.