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.
Key Features
- 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.
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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