Festival is a free software for speech synthesis, it is distributed under an X11-type licence allowing unrestricted commercial and non-commercial use alike.From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech.

Installing Festival

in Ubuntu/Debian :

apt-get install festival

Using Festival

Type festival in the terminal to get in the festival console

$ festival
Festival Speech Synthesis System 1.4.3:release Jan 2003
Copyright (C) University of Edinburgh, 1996-2003. All rights reserved.
For details type `(festival_warranty)’
festival>

Getting it to speak

festival> (SayText “Hello world! Isn’t the weather excellent today.”)

or

$ cat hello.txt
Hello world! Isn’t the weather excellent today.
$ festival –tts hello.txt

or

$ echo “Hello world! Isn’t the weather excellent today.” | festival –tts

Festival Gaim Plugin

This is one of my favorite things, I can now hear what my friends type.

If you are using Ubuntu Feisty do apt-get install festival-gaim
If you are using Ubuntu Edgy you can get the Debian Testing package from here.
Select your arch, then select a mirror, download and install:

dpkg -i festival-gaim*.deb

Activating the plugin in Gaim is simple, go to Tools > Plugins and check the box in front of Festival
You can configure it to announce events and select different voices.

Useful Links

Festival project home

The Festival Speech Synthesis System documentation edition 1.4 for Festival Version 1.4.3

Carnival (GUI) for Festival

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