What is Festival ?
Festival is a free text to speech tool developed by the Center for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh.
It is shipped with most Linux distributions and has been released under an X11-type license allowing unrestricted commercial and non-commercial use alike.
A text to speech tool accepts any written text as input and read it out to you.
I use Festival to read me an e-book I downloaded from Project Gutenberg.
When you pass a text file to
festival, it converts the contents of a text file into voice. For example, if I want to read a letter (mail) which is residing in a text file (say letter.txt). I can let festival read it out loud for me as follows:
$ festival --tts letter.txt
A Few More Examples
You can use
festivalin batch process mode without any user interaction.
festivalis started with out passing any command line parameters, you are dropped into a shell where you can make
festivalread out what ever text you type on the command line.
For instance, check the following examples:
$ festival festival> (SayText "Greetings from www.aboutlinux.info")
You can ask Festival to read a text file for you.
festival> (tts "myfile.txt")
- Available for Free under an open source license.
- The quality of the voice and the pronunciations are very good.
- Supports 3 languages - English, Spanish, and Welsh.
- When it encounters a word not in its vocabulary, it tends to spell the word rather than pronounce it.
- At present, it works only on text files. So if you intend to read a PDF document using festival, it won't work.
Other than such minor hiccups, Festival is a very usable, free text to speech tool available in Linux.