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Welcome to festvox.org
This project is part of the work at Carnegie Mellon University's speech group aimed at advancing the state of Speech Synthesis.

  • 25th December 2017: A suite of new releases: There is a general script that shows what you need to download, compile and run to use these new versions. A do_install script for those who know what they are doing, and do_arctic script to build arctic voices, and a do_indic to build indic voices. But all of these scripts require you to look at the script to see what they do before they will work.

The Festvox project aims to make the building of new synthetic voices more systemic and better documented, making it possible for anyone to build a new voice. Specifically we offer:

  • Documentation, including scripts explaining the background and specifics for building new voices for speech synthesis in new and supported languages.
  • Specific scripts to build new voices in supported languages, such as US and UK English.
  • Aids to building synthetic voices for limited domains
  • Example speech databases to help building new voices.
  • Links, demos and a repository for new voices
The documentation, tools and dependent software are all free without restriction (commercial or otherwise). Licencing of voices built by these techniques are the responsibility of the builders.

This work is firmly grounded within Edinburgh University's Festival Speech Synthesis System and Carnegie Mellon University's small footprint Flite synthesis engine

This work has been supported be various groups including, Carnegie Mellon University, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Requirements for building a voice
Note the techniques and processes described here do not guarantee that you'll end up with a high quality acceptable voice, but with a little care you can likely build a new synthesis voice in a supported language in a few days, or in a new language in a few weeks (more or less depending on the complexity of the language, and the desired quality).

You will need:

  • To read the documentation
  • A Unix machine (e.g. Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc) with working audio i/o. This may work on other platforms but many scripts, perhaps unnecessarily, depend on Unix utilties like, awk, sed etc.
  • Installed versions of Edinburgh University's Festival Speech Synthesis System and Edinburgh Speech Tools (distributed with Festival).
  • A waveform viewing/labeling program like emulabel distributed as part of Macquarie University's EMU speech database system. Although automatic labeling software is included in festvox, a display tool is necessary for diagnosis and debugging.
  • Patience and care, and a little interest in the subject of speech technology.
CMU/LTI This page is maintained by Alan W Black (awb@cs.cmu.edu)
Festvox is a project within LTI at Carnegie Mellon University