The Centre for Speech Technology Research, The university of Edinburgh

Festival Source Distribution

version 1.95 (2.0 beta): July 2004

Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as well as including examples of various modules. As a whole it offers full text to speech through a number APIs: from shell level, though a Scheme command interpreter, as a C++ library, and an Emacs interface. Festival is multi-lingual (currently English, Welsh and Spanish) though English is the most advanced.

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. Documentation is given in the FSF texinfo format which can generate, a printed manual, info files and HTML.

This distribution includes:

Festival version 1.95 is available for free for unrestricted use, see here for copyright.

4 American voices and Mexican Spanish are available with a signal processing module from the TTS groups at CSLU at Oregon Graduate Institute. http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/tts/download

Older versions of Festival have been removed from distribution to save space. However, if you need an older version for some reason please mail festival-help@cstr.ed.ac.uk and we will make it available for you

Requirements

To run Festival you need:

Restrictions

Unlike versions prior to 1.4.0 this version is free for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial alike. Although it is our intention that the copyright allows commercial use without further licensing if you intend to use this commercially please check the actual copyright and the COPYING file in each of the distributions. If you do use the system commercially we would be interested to know so we can show we are making a useful contribution.

Note that the British English lexicon is derived from Oxford Advanced Learners' Dictionary of Current English and that sub-system alone in our distribution is restricted for non-commercial use only. We hope to rectify this with an alternative free lexicon in the near future.

Thank you for your continued interest in our work.