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This project is part of the work at
Carnegie Mellon
University's speech group aimed at advancing the state of Speech Synthesis.
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November 2010: Festival 2.1 released
A surprising official new version of Festival is released. Updating
support for various machines and merging the support for HTS,
Clustergen, Multisyn and Clunit voices.
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Jan 21st 2007: Festvox-2.1 Release
Festvox-2.1 has been released. New with this release is Clustergen
Statistical Parametric Synthesis support, EHMM acoustic labeler (no
longer dependent on Sphinx) Thanks to Kishore, Voice Conversion
support (thanks to Tomoki Toda), and cygwin support. See ANNOUNCE-2.1 for more
details.
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).
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Requirements for building a voice
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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.
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CMU Speech Software
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CMU Speech Group
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