Festival

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