Festival offers a full text to speech system with various APIs, as well an environment for development and research of speech synthesis techniques. It includes a Scheme-based command interpreter.
Besides research into speech synthesis, festival is useful as a stand-alone speech synthesis program. It is capable of producing clearly understandable speech from text.
The system is written in C++ and uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools Library for low level architecture and has a Scheme (SIOD) based command interpreter for control. There are a number of graphical user interfaces that rely on Festival.
Features include:
- Externally configurable language independent modules:
- phonesets.
- lexicons.
- letter-to-sound rules.
- tokenizing.
- part of speech tagging.
- intonation and duration .
- Waveform synthesizers:
- Multisyn unit selection engine.
- HTS parametric synthesis engine.
- Clustergen parametric synthesis engine.
- Clunits unit selection engine.
- diphone based: residual excited LPC (and PSOLA not for distribution).
- MBROLA database support.
- SABLE markup, Emacs, client/server, scripting interfaces.
- HTS hidden Markov model based synthesis engine API integration.
Website: www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival
Support: Documentation
Developer: Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) of the University of Edinburgh
License: Free X11-type license
Festival is written in the C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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