The Festival Speech Synthesis System is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system originally developed by Alan W. Black, Paul Taylor and Richard Caley at the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

. Substantial contributions have also been provided by

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

and other sites. It is distributed under a

free software license A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and software distribution, redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holde ...

similar to the

BSD License BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD li ...

. It offers a full text to speech system with various APIs, as well as an environment for development and research of speech synthesis techniques. It is written in C++ with a Scheme-like command interpreter for general customization and extension. Festival is designed to support multiple languages, and comes with support for English ( British and American pronunciation),

Welsh Welsh may refer to: Related to Wales * Welsh, referring or related to Wales * Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales * Welsh people People * Welsh (surname) * Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peopl ...

, and Spanish. Voice packages exist for several other languages, such as

Castilian Spanish In English, Castilian Spanish can mean the variety of Peninsular Spanish spoken in northern and central Spain, the standard form of Spanish, or Spanish from Spain in general. In Spanish, the term (Castilian) can either refer to the Spanish langua ...

, Czech, Finnish,

Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of North India, northern, Central India, centr ...

, Italian,

Marathi Marathi may refer to: *Marathi people, an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group of Maharashtra, India *Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people *Palaiosouda, also known as Marathi, a small island in Greece See also * * ...

, Polish, Russian and

Telugu Telugu may refer to: * Telugu language, a major Dravidian language of India *Telugu people, an ethno-linguistic group of India * Telugu script, used to write the Telugu language ** Telugu (Unicode block), a block of Telugu characters in Unicode S ...

Festvox

The Festvox project aims to make the building of new synthetic voices more systematic and better documented, making it possible for anyone to build a new voice. It is distributed under a

similar to the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license co ...

. Festvox is a suite of tools by Alan W. Black and Kevin Lenzo for building synthetic voices for Festival. It includes a step-by-step tutorial with examples in document called "Building Synthetic Voices".

Flite

Flite is a small run-time speech synthesis engine developed at

, derived from both Festival and Festvox.

Linux compatibility

There is a Festival

plug-in Plug-in, plug in or plugin may refer to: * Plug-in (computing) is a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program. ** Audio plug-in, adds audio signal processing features ** Photoshop plugin, a piece of softwar ...

for GStreamer. Festival is pre-packaged for several Linux distributions.

References

External links

The Festival Speech Synthesis System

Flite at CMU

Festvox

Flinger singing synthesis

{{Speech synthesis Free speech synthesis software Free multimedia software Free software programmed in C++ Spoken articles Singing software synthesizers