Festival, a great multi lingual speech synthesis system

Festival is a great multi lingual speech synthesis software available for linux. It offers a full text to speech conversion. And this is probably the most interesting and useful feature of it. It can be easily downloaded and installed on ubuntu. Actually, it is easily available for most of the linux distributions in the form of a Gstreamer plugin. In this small howto, I will tell you how to install Festival in Ubuntu 9.04

Now, back to its text to speech capability. It is fun and useful at the same time. But in order to use it we will have to install it first. Run this command to do that for you.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install festival

Now, festival converts the text content into speech. You can provide the content either through a file or at the command line. You can use it as follows:

[shredder12]$ festival - - tts file.txt

And it will read out the contents of the file. Now, you can also provide the text directly through the command line. Enter the command  

[shredder12]$ festival 

and you will see festival command line mode (or interactive mode).  

festival > SayText(“your text”) 

In a way, this is fun but a lot of useful things can be done using it. You can let it read your mails or give it a story and it will read it for you while you are lying on the bed with your eyes closed. Seems good !! Isn't it ;).

Now, there is a simple command line utility provided with festival which let you convert the text content in to audio files. It is text2wave, this is how you use it.

[shredder12]$ echo Hi, i m festival | text2wave > file.wav

[shredder12]$ aplay file.wav

Interestingly, you don't have to be a speech synthesizer to use Festival but you can do a lot of useful and time saving stuff with it. For example, pidgin has a festival plugin, you can actually hear the received messages. Read this article for configuring it to work on your system. Enjoy the festival ;).