Festival grew out of the need for a unifying, flexible, and extensible tool for research and educational purposes at The Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) at University of Edinburgh.įestival is a free, portable, extensible, language-independent, run-time speech synthesis engine for various platforms that has been under development since 1999. In order for a tool to be flexible, it must have well-defined programming interfaces - otherwise, extensions and modifications will be hard to develop and maintain - and it must be interoperable with other tools.įestival Speech Synthesis System is one such tool. But mere openness is not a guarantee of flexibility. Having access to the source code allows the researcher, at least in theory, to make the needed modifications. Frequently a researcher is faced with a tool that almost does the task at hand, but needs some tweaking. There are many advantages to using open source software for research work. Recently, the speech research community has been turning toward open source software, as exemplified by toolkits such as CSLU toolkit, the ISIP Automatic Speech Recognition toolkit, and the Edinburgh speech tools, all of which can help your computer find its voice. Some commercially available TTS systems include: You can find a wide array of software tools for speech synthesis, ranging from commercial products to software for download over the Internet, with varying kinds of licensing. Software-based systems are easy to configure and update, and much less expensive than their hardware counterparts. Since computers have become more powerful, most synthesizers today are software-based. The first commercial speech synthesis systems were mostly hardware-based, and their development process was time-consuming and expensive. Speech synthesizers, often called text-to-speech (TTS) synthesizer systems, can be implemented in either software or hardware. Speech synthesis - automatic generation of human speech waveforms without directly using a human voice - has been under development for decades. Festival Speech Synthesis System aims to make things a little easier on interface developers. However, this deceptively simple means of exchanging information is, in fact, extremely complicated. Speech, which is by far the most widely used and natural means of communication between people, is an obvious possible substitute. Up to now such communication has been almost entirely by means of video screens. As information technology becomes more pervasive, the issues of communication between information-processing machines and people becomes increasingly important.

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