From LQWiki
Festival provides all the general tools needed to develop complete speech synthesis systems. An overview and examples can be found at Festvox.org.
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How to install
You should install by means of your distribution as described at installing software. If that is not possible,
- download festival and speech_tools from http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
- apply the patch from http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-accessibility&m=112757271022463&w=2
- build speech_tools:
./configure && make && make install
- build festival
How to run
Say something:
$ echo "Linux Questions" | festival --tts
Read a book:
$ festival --tts waroftheworlds.txt
Use text2wave to convert text to an audio file, to place on media player or burn to CD. (the wave file in the example below can quickly become a large file; You can convert to MP3 using the Lame MP3 encoder or other compressed audio formats using Sox):
$ text2wave -o waroftheworlds.wav waroftheworlds.txt
Festival's programming language, a variant of Lisp, can be a powerful tool to develop new voices and add speech to your existing project. A complete Scheme reference is available on festvox.org. The below example simply shows how you can make your computer say "hello":
$ festival Festival Speech Synthesis System 1.96:beta July 2004 Copyright (C) University of Edinburgh, 1996-2004. All rights reserved. For details type `(festival_warranty)' festival> (SayText "hello"); #<Utterance 0xb6e49eb8> festival> (quit)
Improve voice quality
There are many free voices available (e.g. MBROLA, CMU Arctic, Nitech HTS). One possible starting point for a high-quality and low-cost commercial voice is Cepstral.
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