Linux Multimedia Hacks

Make Your Computer Talk to You

Install Festival on a computer to convert text to speech.

Whenever I see a science fiction movie set in the future, computers almost always fit a certain profile. They are either a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that can talk to people, or they are bent on world domination (or sometimes both). While the AI part isn’t exactly there yet, and hopefully the world domination bit is a ways off, computers talking to us is something we can have today. This hack shows you how to use Festival to convert text into speech.

Festival is a speech synthesis system hosted by the Center for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival). Actually, using Festival for basic text-to-speech is an underuse of the technology, because the system provides for all sorts of advanced speech synthesis in any number of languages.

To make Festival convert text to speech, you will need a few different components. First you need the core Festival program itself; next you need the Edinburgh Speech Tools library; after that you need some sort of lexicon database Festival can use (popular ones are the festlex OALD (Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary) and festlex POSLEX (Parts of Speech Lexicons); and finally you need a speech database. Which speech database you choose basically depends on what sort of voices you want to hear. These festvox packages provide voices for American English males and females, British English voices, ...