Festival
Festival provides all the general tools needed to develop complete speech synthesis systems. An overview and examples can be found at Festvox.org.
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
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.