Festival
| Developer(s) | Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) of the University of Edinburgh |
|---|---|
| Initial release | October 12, 2004 |
| Stable release | 2.5.1
/ July 6, 2020 |
| Repository | https://github.com /festvox/festival |
| Written in | C++ |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Speech synthesizer |
| License | Special license similar to the MIT Software License |
| Website | www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ |
Festival is a text to speech engine developed by the British at the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) division at the University of Edinburgh. It sounds very robot-like. The speech it creates is understandable but it is not anything remotely close human-sounding. It works, and it can be used for text to speech, but it is not the best free software alternative.
Installation[edit]
The basic festival software is typically available as package named festival but the optional voice packages tend to be named festvox-{voice} (festvox-clb-arctic-hts, festvox-kal-diphone, etc).
Voice files are placed in /usr/share/festival/voices/us/
Basic Use[edit]
Festival can say anything piped to it as long as the -tts option:
echo 'hello' | festival --tts
You can pipe files to festival and have them read:
echo "Hello world" > example.txt
festival --tts < example.txt
Festival can be configured by creating a $HOME/.festivalrc configuration file.
Festival will create a incriminating text file called $HOME/.festival_history with every command sent to it.
Festival is one of many programs that can be used with the Linux speech-dispatcher daemon. Programs like Kmouth will use Festival for text-to-speech if speech-dispatcher is configured to use it (Festival not the default on any GNU/Linux distribution we are aware of).
Audio Quality[edit]
The text to speech output generated by Festival does not sound very natural, it is very robot-like. It is understandable. It's just not very human-sounding and it is not very impressive compared to commercial solution and it is not as good as the free software mimic alternative.
echo 'this is not a test! I repeat, this is not a test' | festival --tts
Alternatives[edit]
| Program | rating | example | voice |
|---|---|---|---|
| espeak-ng v1.50 |
|
default | |
| festival 2.5.0 |
|
default | |
| flite 1.3 (2005) |
|
default | |
| mimic v1.3.0.1 |
|
ab | |
| slt |
See Text to Speech synthesis software for a indepth comparison of free text to speech software.
See also[edit]
- Mimic, another text to speech synthesis tool.
- Kmouth, a KDE program where you can type text and have it read out loud.
Links[edit]
The Festival homepage is at www.cstr.ed.ac.uk /projects/festival/. The source code repository is at github.com /festvox/festival.
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