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.
Key Features
- 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.
Related Software
| Speech Tools | |
|---|---|
| Piper | Fast, local neural text to speech system |
| Tortoise | Multi-voice text-to-speech system trained with an emphasis on quality |
| Coqui TTS | Offers pretrained models in more than 1,100 different languages |
| Bark | Transformer-based text-to-audio model. |
| Dia | 1.6B parameter text to speech model |
| Festival | General multi-lingual speech synthesis system |
| PraatSpeechAnalyser | Software for speech analysis and synthesis |
| Speech Note | Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Machine Translation |
| Mimic 3 | Lightweight Text to Speech engine |
| OrcaScreenReader | Scriptable screen reader |
| MeloTTS | High-quality multi-lingual text-to-speech library |
| Parler-TTS | Lightweight text-to-speech (TTS) model |
| Flite | Small, fast run time text to speech synthesis engine |
| RHVoice | Gives the visually impaired a synthesis voice with their screen reader |
| eSpeak NG | Continuation of the eSpeak project |
| eSpeak | Speech synthesizer using a formant synthesis method |
| Orpheus-TTS-FastAPI | High-performance self-hosted text-to-speech server |
| Gespeaker | GTK-based frontend for eSpeak |
| VoiceGen | Simple text-to-speech application |
| Glate | Google Translator and Text To Speech Service |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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