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# Festival

From ArchWiki

Festival is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system developed at CSTR (Centre for Speech Technology Research).

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, from Java, and an Emacs interface. Festival is multi-lingual (currently British English, American English, and Spanish.)

## Installation

Install festival from official repositories. You need a voice package like festival-english or festival-us. Further languages are available in official repositories and in AUR.

Test festival:

    $ echo "This is an example. Arch is the best." | festival --tts

If your hear all the example text, you sucessfully installed a TTS system.

If you do not hear anything, hear something strange, or get a message about /dev/dsp, see the Troubleshooting section.

### HTS compatibility patches

Some say that HTS voices for Festival are the best ones freely available. Sadly they are not compatible with Festival >2.1 without patching it (and the new voice versions are not made available for downloading).

You can install the patched version from AUR: festival-patched-hts and festival-hts-voices-patched

### Using with PulseAudio

Add these lines to the end of your .festivalrc file, or to /usr/share/festival/festival.scm :

    (Parameter.set 'Audio_Required_Format 'aiff)
    (Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
    (Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "paplay $FILE --client-name=Festival --stream-name=Speech")

## Configuration

You can set a default voice by adding these lines to the end of your `~/.festivalrc` file, or to `/usr/share/festival/festival.scm`:

    (set! voice_default 'voice_cmu_us_slt_arctic_hts)

You can also set the default voice in `/usr/share/festival/voices.scm` You must be root and the voices are at the end of the file. Just switch them around

## Usage

Read a text file:

    festival --tts /path/to/letter.txt

Read a text file to wav:

    cat letter.txt | text2wave -o letter.wav

### Interactive mode (testing voices etc.)

festival has an interactive prompt you can use for testing. Some examples (with sample output):

    $ festival
    [...]
    festival>

List available voices:

    festival> (voice.list)
    (cstr_us_awb_arctic_multisyn kal_diphone don_diphone)

Set voice:

    festival> (voice_cstr_us_awb_arctic_multisyn)
    #<voice 0x1545b90>

Speak:

    festival> (SayText '"test this is a test oh no a test bla test")
    inserting pause after: t.
    Inserting pause
    [...]
    id _63 ; name t ;
    id _65 ; name # ;
    #<Utterance 0x7f7c0c144810>

More:

    festival> help
    "The Festival Speech Synthesizer System: Help

Quit: ctrl+d or

    festival> (quit)

### Example script

One classic app that can make use of this is ping. Use this script to constantly ping a host, and return ping if success, fail is not:

    #!/bin/bash
    while :; do
      ping -c 1 $1 && (echo "Ping" | festival --tts) || (echo "Fail" | festival --tts)
    done

Note that this does not really work on multisynth voices, as they take a while to prepare before playing.

## Troubleshooting

### Can't open /dev/dsp

If festival returns the following error message:

    Linux: can't open /dev/dsp

Switch to ALSA output by adding these lines to the end of your .festivalrc file, or to /usr/share/festival/festival.scm (source):

    (Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
    (Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r $SR $FILE")

### Alsa playing at wrong speed

If the solution above gives you a squeaky voice, you might want to try:

    (Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
    (Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "aplay -Dplug:default -f S16_LE -r $SR $FILE")

### aplay Command not found

Install alsa-utils

## External links

- Festival manual

Retrieved from "https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Festival&oldid=279016"
Categories:

- Accessibility
- Audio/Video

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