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Contents 1 Introduction 2 Step 1: Installation 3 Step 2: Add voices 3.1 American English 3.2 British English 3.3 Other voices 4 Step 3: Testing and debugging 4.1 Debugging

[edit] Introduction

Festival is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system developed at CSTR (Centre for Speech Technology Research).

[edit] Step 1: Installation

Festival is in the extra repository so:

# pacman -S festival

You will also need to install one or more voices because by default there is no voice to speak with.

[edit] Step 2: Add voices

[edit] American English

American English male voice `kal' 16kHz version:

# pacman -S festival-kallpc16k

[edit] British English

British English male voice `rab' 16kHz version:

# pacman -S festival-rablpc16k

[edit] Other voices

Other voices are available for Festival, some of them can be found in AUR.

[edit] Step 3: Testing and debugging

To test festival lets make it speak an example text:

$ echo "This is an example. Seems like I'm working fine."|festival --tts

If your hear all the example text below: congratulations, you just installed a TTS system.

If you don't hear anything or just the beginning of the example sentence continue below.

[edit] Debugging

If festival returns the following error message:

Linux: can't open /dev/dsp

Switch to ALSA output by adding these lines to the end of your .festivalrc file, or to /usr/share/festival/festival.scm (source):

(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r $SR $FILE")