From LQWiki

Contents 1 Introduction 2 How to install 3 How to register a voice 4 How to use Cepstral

Introduction

Swift is a text-to-speech engine made by Cepstral (See www.Cepstral.com). It is a commercial solution, but it is very cheap. It is leaps and bounds ahead of Festival, and will surely leave you very surprised. You can download voices and use them without paying, but they include a few seconds of 'nag' at the beginning of the sentences. There are 8KHz versions of the voices available, if you wanted to use Cepstral with Asterisk (ie. call your computer for example).

You can activate voices by buying a licence key, and running:

# swift --reg-voice

Once installed.

How to install

Cepstral is not available readily from package repositories. You need to download it and install it via http://www.cepstral.com.

• Go to http://www.cepstral.com/downloads/.
• Pick a voice that you like, or go to http://www.cepstral.com/demos to try them first.
• Once you've downloaded the package, extract it and run:

./install

• If asked, choose the default options.

How to register a voice

• Go to http://www.cepstral.com/store and purchase a licence key.
• Log onto your box and type:

# swift --reg-voice

• Follow the instructions and remember to type everything in exactly as per the invoice.

How to use Cepstral

Once installed, you can use swift similarly to Festival:

$ swift "Hello, this is a test."

For further information on styles and other options, please see the Cepstral support pages at http://www.cepstral.com/support/.