The Festival Speech Synthesis System

• Compilation
• Installation
• License

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This directory contains the Festival Speech Synthesis System, developed at CSTR, University of Edinburgh. The project was originally started by Alan W Black and Paul Taylor but many others have been involved.

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 (US and UK) and Spanish are distributed but a host of other voices have been developed by others) though English is the most advanced.

The system is written in C++ and uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools 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.

Compilation

In order to build festival, the Edinburgh Speech Tools project needs to be built. The location of build tree of these tools needs to be specified in the ESTDIR environment variable. For example:

export ESTDIR=`pwd`/../speech_tools

The festival project uses a standard autogen-based build system. It can be built using the following commands:

./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Installation

Festival should run on any standard Unix platform. It has already run on Solaris, SunOS, Linux and FreeBSD. It requires a C++ compiler (GCC 2.7.2, 2.8.1, 2.95.[123], 3.2.3 3.3.2 RedHat "gcc-2.96", gcc 3.3, gcc 4.4.x and gcc-4.5.x are our standard compilers) to install. A port to Windows XP/NT/95/98 and 2000 using either Cygnus GNUWIN32, this is still new but many people are successfully using it.

A detailed description of installation and requirements for the whole system is given in the INSTALL file.

License

Festival is free. Earlier versions were restricted to non-commercial use but we have now relaxed those conditions. The 4-clause BSD licence is an X11 style licence thus it can be incorporated in commercial products and free source products without restriction. It has the following copyright:

Centre for Speech Technology Research
University of Edinburgh, UK
Copyright (c) 1996-2014
All Rights Reserved.

The changes to the project are described in the CHANGELOG.md file in order to comply with clause 2 of the BSD license. This also includes the changes in the official festival releases.