Festival at CMU	Demos	Manual	Download	Festival at Edinburgh

University of Edinburgh's

Festival Speech Synthesis System Distribution

US mirror at CMU

version 1.4.3: 28th Jan 2003

This is the secondary US mirror site hosted by the CMU speech group for Edinburgh University's Festival Speech Synthesis System The primary distribution site is http://festvox.org/festival

Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as well as including examples of various modules. As a whole it offers full text to speech through a number APIs: from shell level, though a Scheme command interpreter, as a C++ library, and an Emacs interface. Festival is multi-lingual (currently English, Welsh and Spanish) though English is the most advanced.

Festival version 1.4.3 is available under a free for any use licence as described here.

Unlike the rest of the distribution whose use is basically unrestricted, note that the lexicon for British English voices is based on Oxford Advanced Learners' Dictionary of Current English festlex_OALD.tar.gz is free only for non-commercial use. The American voices (kal and ked) and the US English lexicon does not have such a restriction

See the README-1.4.3-RELEASE for a description of the files in the distribution and the dependencies between them.

1.4.3 sources, voices and lexicons
Linux binary distribution (RPM + .deb) ... TBA

4 American voices and Mexican Spanish are now available with a new signal processing module from the TTS groups at CSLU at Oregon Graduate Institute. http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/tts/download

Requirements

To run Festival you need:

A Unix machine, Festival has compiled and run on Suns (SunOS and Solaris), FreeBSD, Linux, SGIs, HPs and DEC Alphas but should be portable to any standard Unix machine.
A C++ compiler, we have tested it under GNU C++ version 2.7.2, 2.8.1, 2.95.[123], "2.96", egcs, gcc-3.x
GNU Make any recent version
Audio hardware, /dev/audio (8bit and 16bit for Suns, Linux and FreeBSD) and NCD's NAS network transparent audio system are supported directly but Festival supports the execution of any Unix command that can play audio files.

This version includes preliminary support for compiling and use under Windows NT and 95. A port using Cygnus's GNU win32 package is fairly stable and there is also support for Microsoft's Visual C++. We should make it clear this port is not complete and is only recommended for those with significant Windows/C++ experience.

Please direct any questions to Alan W Black