[ Thanks to Mayank
for this link. ]
“Text to speech convertors are very common these days but
most of them work on the Windows platform. Fortunately, for us
Linux users, there is a very good open source alternative
available. This article will show you how to setup and use
Festival, a great sofware from the University of
Edinburgh.”
“Festival is a speech synthesis software being developed at
CSTR, University of Edinburgh . It is meant to offer developers a
basic framework for building Speech Synthesis systems and it
includes various modules for the purpose of demos. On the whole,
Festival offers Text To Speech through a number of API’s, right
from the shell level to a Command Line Interpreter, a C++ Library
and even an EMACS interface. Though Festival is multi-lingual,
English is the one for which support is the most advanced. Festival
is coded completely in C++ with a scheme-based command interpreter
for general control.”
“The Festival home page is located at
www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival.html. Though the site proclaims
that the project is still in BETA stage, I found festival to be
both stable and effective. I certainly haven’t found a reason to
curse myself for having downloaded Festival.”