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 |
| Bark | Transformer-based text-to-audio model. |
| sherpa-onnx | Speech-to-text and text-to-speech software |
| Coqui TTS | Offers pretrained models in more than 1,100 different languages |
| Dia | 1.6B parameter text to speech model |
| Tortoise | Multi-voice text-to-speech system trained with an emphasis on quality |
| Festival | General multi-lingual speech synthesis system |
| PraatSpeechAnalyser | Software for speech analysis and synthesis |
| Chatterbox | Family of text-to-speech models |
| 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.
 Explore our carefully curated directory of recommended free and open source software, covering every major software category.The directory forms part of our extensive collection of articles for Linux enthusiasts. It includes hundreds of detailed reviews, together with free and open source alternatives to proprietary software from companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. LinuxLinks also covers interesting projects worth exploring, Linux-compatible hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful free and open source Linux application that we haven’t covered? Tell us about it using our submission form. |
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.