CMU Flite (festival-lite) is a small, fast run-time open source text to speech synthesis engine developed at CMU and primarily designed for small embedded machines and/or large servers.
Flite is designed as an alternative text to speech synthesis engine to Festival for voices built using the FestVox suite of voice building tools.
Flite is designed for very small devices, such as PDAs, and also for large server machines which need to serve lots of ports. It’s not a replacement for Festival but an alternative run time engine for voices developed in the FestVox framework where size and speed is crucial.
Features include:
- Thread safe.
- Multi-voice, multi-language.
- Supports synthesis of individual strings or files (utterance by utterance) to direct audio devices or to waveform files.
- Offers simple functions suitable for use in specific applications.
- Voices, lexicons and language descriptions can be compiled (mostly automatically for voices and lexicons) into C representations from their FestVox formats.
- All voices, lexicons and language model data are const and in the text segment (i.e. they may be put in ROM). As they are linked in at compile time, there is virtually no startup delay.
- For standard diphone voices, maximum run time memory requirements are approximately less than twice the memory requirement for the waveform generated. For 32bit archtectures this effectively means under 1MB.
- Support for converting the latest Clustergen Random Forest voices for CMU Flite.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, Android, and openwrt devices.
Website: github.com/festvox/flite
Support:
Developer: Alan W Black and contributors
License: Core code is published under a BSD-like copyright
CMU Flite is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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