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Introduction
Festival is a Text-To-Speech synthesis system developed at the University of Edinburgh. It can be used with several different voices, which are the models and data it uses to convert typed text into audible speech.
This HOWTO is meant to be a centralized collection of information about how to install the currently available voices for the Festival TTS. While sections of this HOWTO may apply to installing voices for other languages, it is primarily concerned with the English language voices.
The layout of this HOWTO is as follows:
Before we get started, make sure all of the preliminary packages are installed on your system with the following command:
Installing the standard Festvox diphone voices
These are the voices that are supplied by the Festvox project, which is run by the Carnegie Mellon University speech group. See the voice demo page (kal, ked, don and rab are the voices of interest). Of all of the voices we are concerned with, these take up the smallest size on disk, and are the only voices currently in the Ubuntu package tree. All of the other voices have to be installed manually. However, these are also the poorest quality voices and currently, on my computer, they cause festival to segfault (though I have used them successfully with other set-ups in the past). YMMV.
Some of the voices have 8k and 16k versions. This is the output frequency of the audio synthesis. The 16k versions have higher quality output and sound better. The four English voices are:
festvox-don
festvox-rablpc[8 16]k
festvox-kallpc[8 16]k
festvox-kdlpc[8 16]k
Searching for other voices to install
To find all the available festvox voices, execute the following command:
Installing the voices
Once you've decided on the voices to install, just install them as you would any other apt package. For example, this command will install all of the English voices using the higher quality 16k voices:
Installing the enhanced MBROLA voices
These voices are provided by the MBROLA project, run by the TCTS Lab of the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons in Belgium. They offer several voices, in a variety of languages, which sound much better than the Festvox diphone voices. The database of voices can be viewed at the project's download page. See the voice demo page (the us1, us2 and us3 are the voices of interest). To use the MBROLA voices we need three parts: (1.) the mbrola binary program that parses a tokenstream the festival program feeds it and returns audio data back to festival, (2.) the MBROLA voices, and (3.) the Festvox wrappers to let the festival program use the voices. This may sound scary, but it's really very easy to do.
Downloading the voices, binary and wrappers
We will download everything we need for the English voices into a temporary directory (total download size is approximately twenty megs):
Installing the binary, unpacking the voices and wrappers
Since the MBROLA project has kindly provided us with a binary deb, we can skip the step of building the binary from souce and just use dpkg to install it:
If you're paranoid about installing a deb from a third-party like the MBROLA project, you can grab the binary in a zip file from their download page and install it manually. There doesn't appear to be any source package released to the public, so if you're extremely paranoid, you may just want to avoid using the MBROLA voices altogether. I've personally never had a problem using the binary either from the zip or the deb.
Next we'll unpack the voices and the wrappers:
Installing the voices and wrappers
First we'll make the directories where the voices will be installed:
Then we can install the voices and wrappers there:
Tidy up
Lastly, we can remove the temporary directory:
If all went well, you now have a set of working MBROLA voices installed. See the section below on how to test that the voices are working properly.
Installing the enhanced CMU Arctic voices
These voices were developed by the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. They sound much better than both the diphone and the MBROLA voices. See the information page and voice demo page (the *_arctic_cg are the voices of interest). The drawback is that each voice takes over a hundred megs on disk, and with six English voices to choose from, that can take up a lot of bandwidth to download and depending on how much disk space you have to work with, six-hundred plus megs of space might be a bit much for voice data. However, the HTS voices discussed in the next section may in fact provide equal or better quality synthesis, and are only less than %2 of the size.
Downloading the voices
We will download everything we need for the English voices into a temporary directory (total download size is approximately six-hundred megs — you might want to go brew some coffee or something, lots of it...we might be here a while):
Note: You can add the option '--limit-rate' to wget to set a maximum transfer speed (e.g., 'wget -c --limit-rate=60K ...' to limit the download rate to 60KB/s).
Unpacking the voices
Due to the size of the archives, this will probably take a few minutes as well (Maybe get a slice of cake this time? Also, note than tar is run non-verbosely so we don't have seven-million lines flooding the terminal):
Installing the voices
Now we can install the voices:
The voices are now installed, but Festival requires them to have slightly different directory names, so we'll rename the directories as needed.
Note: We could just use symlinks, but then the list of installed voices (see section below on testing voices) would show entries for the actual directories and the symlinks, though only the symlinks would work properly.
Tidy up
Lastly, we can remove the temporary directory:
If all went well, you now have a set of working CMU Arctic voices installed. See the section below on how to test that the voices are working properly.
Installing the enhanced Nitech HTS voices
Note: Unfortunately, these voices require at least Festival 1.95, but only 1.4 is available on Ubuntu prior to Hardy (8.04). This means that if you want to use these voices on any prior release (Gutsy, Feisty...), you need to compile Festival from source. This is relatively easy to do, and a section at the bottom of this HOWTO will guide you through the process. Don't waste your time trying to install these voices on Festival versions less that 1.95, they just won't work.
These voices are produced by the HTS working group hosted at the Nagoya Institute of Technology. They have produced excellent quality voices which take up very little disk space. In terms of quality and size, probably the best (non-commercial) English voices availible for Festival. See the voice demo page (the *_arctic_hts are the voices of interest). Highly recommended. The voices are available on their download page.
Downloading the voices
We will download everything we need for the English voices into a temporary directory (total download size is approximately ten megs):
Unpacking the voices
Next we'll unpack the voices:
Installing the voices
Now we can install the voices:
Tidy up
Lastly, we can remove the temporary directory:
If all went well, you now have a set of working Nitech HTS voices installed. See the section below on how to test that the voices are working properly.
Testing voices and choosing a default voice
Now that you have some voices to play with, you may want to try out different voices to suite your taste, or just to make sure things are working properly. To get a list of all the voices that are installed, you can simply look at the directories under /usr/share/festival/voices:
Or you can run the fetival program, and, at the prompt, enter (voice.list). The result will look something like this:
Playing with the voices
To select a voice, add the prefix 'voice_' to the voice name, and surround it by parentheses:
Then you can test it using (SayText 'The text') to speak a single line of text, or (tts 'somefile.txt' nil) to process an entire file. You can also hear a short introduction about Festival with (intro).
Selecting a default voice
You can edit the file /etc/festival.scm to select a default voice. Open the file in your favorite editor (you will need super-user privleges, so run it with sudo or gksu) and add the line:
Simply replace 'voice_nitech_us_rms_arctic_hts' with whatever your favorite voice is.
Making it work with PulseAudio, ESD or ALSA
By default, festival tries to synthesize speech to /dev/dsp using OSS. To make it work with ESD, PulseAudio or ALSA you have two options. The first is to use a wrapper to call festival, and the second is to make festival internally try to use one of them output. The advantage to the first method is that you can use the esd, pluseaudio or the alsa wrapper at any time, without having to edit the config file. The advantage of the second method is that you don't have to remember to call the wrapper—directly running festival works.
The available wrappers I know of are: the aoss wrapper program from the alsa-oss package, the padsp wrapper from pulseaudio-utils, and the esddsp
To use the internal method, see the instructions for editing /etc/festival.scm at the community docs on TextToSpeech.
An example /etc/festival.scm
This is a drop-in /etc/festival.scm file. It covers all of the options mentioned about selecting a default voice and using ESD or ALSA for audio output. The ';;' are comment specifiers, so to use any of the options simply uncomment them by removing the ';;' in from of them and adding it to whatever you want to deactivate. It doesn't matter whether you have two different options uncommented at the same time (e.g., two different default_voice options), Festival will simply use whichever one is defined last in the file, however it may be a little bit slower to start up in such a case and it's better to just uncomment the one you want to use.
Note: Advanced voice config based on this page
Note: If you have any errors that stop the build process, please report them here so I can update the HOWTO. Even if it's something trivial like a broken path, and you fix it yourself, others may not know how to fix it.
The HTS voices above require at lest Festival 1.95. Here we will go through the steps necessary to build and install Festival 1.96. This method was tested on the Dapper 6.06.1 VMplayer appliance using VirtualBox, so it should work on all Ubuntu releases. We will build a backport using official Ubuntu sources, so you don't need to remove any existing festival installation — apt will upgrade it for you.
We firstly need some development tools, libraries and headers. Use the following command to install the build requirements:
Say yes to whatever dependencies are required.
Downloading the source packages
We will download everything we need for building Festival 1.96 into a temporary directory (total download size is approximately five megs):
Unpacking the sources
Next we'll unpack the sources and fix some versioning stuff so we can backport:
Compiling and installing the sources
Now we can compile the sources. Firstly we need to compile the Speech Tools. I'm using debuild because it makes it easier.
This should have created three deb files, which we need to install before we can build and install Festival:
Now we can build Festival, but first we should add a patch for HTS voices (patch derived from Nitech hts.scm file included in their voices). This step is optional, but recommended, as it can improve the synthesis in some circumstances. Save the following file to festival-1.96~beta/debian/patches/lib_hts.scm.diff:
Note: This file needs to preserve formatting and tab characters! If you get an error about patching failing in the patch command below, try downloading the file from here (right-click save-as) and re-running the patch command. Alternately, you could grab the hts.scm file from a Nitech HTS voice (see section above) and replace the festival-1.96~beta/lib/hts.scm file with it, and skip the patch step.
Now for the actual build:
And now the install:
Tidy up
Lastly, we can remove the temporary directory:
If all went well, you now have Fastival 1.96 installed.
That's it! Have fun!
Nov 12, 2007. University of Federal Armed Forces Munich, CETIM, Germany. Every user has a voice-mail box on his server, accessible from the local network. The goal of my stage is. A separate user and group (to allow external commands to be submitted through the web interface) for Nagios: root@trunks#. Asterisk German Voice Prompts. Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express Command Reference -Cisco Unified CME Commands: T. Vocalizer is a new generation of. Browse through the help pages by clicking on the icons below or selecting pages in the table of contents to the left.
Festival is a Text-To-Speech synthesis system developed at the University of Edinburgh. It can be used with several different voices, which are the models and data it uses to convert typed text into audible speech.
This HOWTO is meant to be a centralized collection of information about how to install the currently available voices for the Festival TTS. While sections of this HOWTO may apply to installing voices for other languages, it is primarily concerned with the English language voices.
The layout of this HOWTO is as follows:
- Installing the standard Festvox diphone voices
- Installing the enhanced MBROLA voices
- Installing the enhanced CMU Arctic voices
- Installing the enhanced Nitech HTS voices
- Testing voices and choosing a default voice
- Installing Festival 1.96 from source
Before we get started, make sure all of the preliminary packages are installed on your system with the following command:
Installing the standard Festvox diphone voices
These are the voices that are supplied by the Festvox project, which is run by the Carnegie Mellon University speech group. See the voice demo page (kal, ked, don and rab are the voices of interest). Of all of the voices we are concerned with, these take up the smallest size on disk, and are the only voices currently in the Ubuntu package tree. All of the other voices have to be installed manually. However, these are also the poorest quality voices and currently, on my computer, they cause festival to segfault (though I have used them successfully with other set-ups in the past). YMMV.
Some of the voices have 8k and 16k versions. This is the output frequency of the audio synthesis. The 16k versions have higher quality output and sound better. The four English voices are:
festvox-don
festvox-rablpc[8 16]k
festvox-kallpc[8 16]k
festvox-kdlpc[8 16]k
Searching for other voices to install
To find all the available festvox voices, execute the following command:
Installing the voices
Once you've decided on the voices to install, just install them as you would any other apt package. For example, this command will install all of the English voices using the higher quality 16k voices:
Installing the enhanced MBROLA voices
These voices are provided by the MBROLA project, run by the TCTS Lab of the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons in Belgium. They offer several voices, in a variety of languages, which sound much better than the Festvox diphone voices. The database of voices can be viewed at the project's download page. See the voice demo page (the us1, us2 and us3 are the voices of interest). To use the MBROLA voices we need three parts: (1.) the mbrola binary program that parses a tokenstream the festival program feeds it and returns audio data back to festival, (2.) the MBROLA voices, and (3.) the Festvox wrappers to let the festival program use the voices. This may sound scary, but it's really very easy to do.
Downloading the voices, binary and wrappers
We will download everything we need for the English voices into a temporary directory (total download size is approximately twenty megs):
Installing the binary, unpacking the voices and wrappers
Since the MBROLA project has kindly provided us with a binary deb, we can skip the step of building the binary from souce and just use dpkg to install it:
If you're paranoid about installing a deb from a third-party like the MBROLA project, you can grab the binary in a zip file from their download page and install it manually. There doesn't appear to be any source package released to the public, so if you're extremely paranoid, you may just want to avoid using the MBROLA voices altogether. I've personally never had a problem using the binary either from the zip or the deb.
Next we'll unpack the voices and the wrappers:
Installing the voices and wrappers
First we'll make the directories where the voices will be installed:
Then we can install the voices and wrappers there:
Tidy up
Lastly, we can remove the temporary directory:
If all went well, you now have a set of working MBROLA voices installed. See the section below on how to test that the voices are working properly.
Installing the enhanced CMU Arctic voices
These voices were developed by the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. They sound much better than both the diphone and the MBROLA voices. See the information page and voice demo page (the *_arctic_cg are the voices of interest). The drawback is that each voice takes over a hundred megs on disk, and with six English voices to choose from, that can take up a lot of bandwidth to download and depending on how much disk space you have to work with, six-hundred plus megs of space might be a bit much for voice data. However, the HTS voices discussed in the next section may in fact provide equal or better quality synthesis, and are only less than %2 of the size.
Downloading the voices
We will download everything we need for the English voices into a temporary directory (total download size is approximately six-hundred megs — you might want to go brew some coffee or something, lots of it...we might be here a while):
Note: You can add the option '--limit-rate' to wget to set a maximum transfer speed (e.g., 'wget -c --limit-rate=60K ...' to limit the download rate to 60KB/s).
Unpacking the voices
Due to the size of the archives, this will probably take a few minutes as well (Maybe get a slice of cake this time? Also, note than tar is run non-verbosely so we don't have seven-million lines flooding the terminal):
Installing the voices
Now we can install the voices:
The voices are now installed, but Festival requires them to have slightly different directory names, so we'll rename the directories as needed.
Note: We could just use symlinks, but then the list of installed voices (see section below on testing voices) would show entries for the actual directories and the symlinks, though only the symlinks would work properly.
Tidy up
Lastly, we can remove the temporary directory:
If all went well, you now have a set of working CMU Arctic voices installed. See the section below on how to test that the voices are working properly.
Installing the enhanced Nitech HTS voices
Note: Unfortunately, these voices require at least Festival 1.95, but only 1.4 is available on Ubuntu prior to Hardy (8.04). This means that if you want to use these voices on any prior release (Gutsy, Feisty...), you need to compile Festival from source. This is relatively easy to do, and a section at the bottom of this HOWTO will guide you through the process. Don't waste your time trying to install these voices on Festival versions less that 1.95, they just won't work.
These voices are produced by the HTS working group hosted at the Nagoya Institute of Technology. They have produced excellent quality voices which take up very little disk space. In terms of quality and size, probably the best (non-commercial) English voices availible for Festival. See the voice demo page (the *_arctic_hts are the voices of interest). Highly recommended. The voices are available on their download page.
Downloading the voices
We will download everything we need for the English voices into a temporary directory (total download size is approximately ten megs):
Unpacking the voices
Next we'll unpack the voices:
Installing the voices
Now we can install the voices:
Tidy up
Lastly, we can remove the temporary directory:
If all went well, you now have a set of working Nitech HTS voices installed. See the section below on how to test that the voices are working properly.
Testing voices and choosing a default voice
Now that you have some voices to play with, you may want to try out different voices to suite your taste, or just to make sure things are working properly. To get a list of all the voices that are installed, you can simply look at the directories under /usr/share/festival/voices:
Or you can run the fetival program, and, at the prompt, enter (voice.list). The result will look something like this:Playing with the voices
To select a voice, add the prefix 'voice_' to the voice name, and surround it by parentheses:
Then you can test it using (SayText 'The text') to speak a single line of text, or (tts 'somefile.txt' nil) to process an entire file. You can also hear a short introduction about Festival with (intro).
Selecting a default voice
You can edit the file /etc/festival.scm to select a default voice. Open the file in your favorite editor (you will need super-user privleges, so run it with sudo or gksu) and add the line:
Simply replace 'voice_nitech_us_rms_arctic_hts' with whatever your favorite voice is.
Making it work with PulseAudio, ESD or ALSA
By default, festival tries to synthesize speech to /dev/dsp using OSS. To make it work with ESD, PulseAudio or ALSA you have two options. The first is to use a wrapper to call festival, and the second is to make festival internally try to use one of them output. The advantage to the first method is that you can use the esd, pluseaudio or the alsa wrapper at any time, without having to edit the config file. The advantage of the second method is that you don't have to remember to call the wrapper—directly running festival works.
The available wrappers I know of are: the aoss wrapper program from the alsa-oss package, the padsp wrapper from pulseaudio-utils, and the esddsp
Free Voice Prompts
wrapper from esound-clients — but caveat emptor — there is a bug (#214465) in the esddsp script right now (see this post for a quick-fix).To use the internal method, see the instructions for editing /etc/festival.scm at the community docs on TextToSpeech.
An example /etc/festival.scm
This is a drop-in /etc/festival.scm file. It covers all of the options mentioned about selecting a default voice and using ESD or ALSA for audio output. The ';;' are comment specifiers, so to use any of the options simply uncomment them by removing the ';;' in from of them and adding it to whatever you want to deactivate. It doesn't matter whether you have two different options uncommented at the same time (e.g., two different default_voice options), Festival will simply use whichever one is defined last in the file, however it may be a little bit slower to start up in such a case and it's better to just uncomment the one you want to use.
Note: Advanced voice config based on this page
Red Asterisk Icon
Installing Festival 1.96 from sourceNote: If you have any errors that stop the build process, please report them here so I can update the HOWTO. Even if it's something trivial like a broken path, and you fix it yourself, others may not know how to fix it.
The HTS voices above require at lest Festival 1.95. Here we will go through the steps necessary to build and install Festival 1.96. This method was tested on the Dapper 6.06.1 VMplayer appliance using VirtualBox, so it should work on all Ubuntu releases. We will build a backport using official Ubuntu sources, so you don't need to remove any existing festival installation — apt will upgrade it for you.
We firstly need some development tools, libraries and headers. Use the following command to install the build requirements:
Say yes to whatever dependencies are required.
Downloading the source packages
We will download everything we need for building Festival 1.96 into a temporary directory (total download size is approximately five megs):
Unpacking the sources
Next we'll unpack the sources and fix some versioning stuff so we can backport:
Compiling and installing the sources
Now we can compile the sources. Firstly we need to compile the Speech Tools. I'm using debuild because it makes it easier.
This should have created three deb files, which we need to install before we can build and install Festival:
Now we can build Festival, but first we should add a patch for HTS voices (patch derived from Nitech hts.scm file included in their voices). This step is optional, but recommended, as it can improve the synthesis in some circumstances. Save the following file to festival-1.96~beta/debian/patches/lib_hts.scm.diff:
Note: This file needs to preserve formatting and tab characters! If you get an error about patching failing in the patch command below, try downloading the file from here (right-click save-as) and re-running the patch command. Alternately, you could grab the hts.scm file from a Nitech HTS voice (see section above) and replace the festival-1.96~beta/lib/hts.scm file with it, and skip the patch step.
Now for the actual build:
And now the install:
Tidy up
Lastly, we can remove the temporary directory:
If all went well, you now have Fastival 1.96 installed.
That's it! Have fun!