Festvox 2.0 review

The Festvox project aims to make the building of new synthetic voices more systemic and better documented, making it possible for any

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 1651K Developer: Alan W Black

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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. It has two new synthesis techniques (multisyn and HTS).

Requirements:
A Unix Machine although there is nothing inheritantly Unix about the scripts, no attempt has yet been made about porting this to other platforms Festival and Speech Tools This uses speech tools programs and festival itself at various stages in builidng voices as well as (of course) for the final voices. Festival and the Edinburgh Speech Tools are available from
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ or http://www.festvox.org/festival

It is recommended that you compile your own versions of these as you will need the libraries and include files to build some programs in this festvox. EMU Labeller The University of Macquarie's Speech Hearing and Language Research Centre distribute labelling tools for speech databases. We use it here for viewing speech, as spectrograms, F0s phone labels etc. It is available from http://www.shlrc.mq.edu.au/emu/ Other Waveform labeller/viewers exist and you find them more convinient to use but we include support for emulabel as it meets our requirements and is freely available.

Patience and understanding
Building a new voice is a lot of work, and something will probably go wrong which may require the repetition of some long boring and tedious process. Even with lots of care a new voice still might just not work. In distributing this document we hope to increase the
basic knowledge of synthesis out there and hopefully find people who can improve on this making the processing easier and more reliable in the future.

What's New in This Release:
Better clunits general voice support
Support for CMU Sphinx and SphinxTrain to build acoustic models for labeling
DOCBOOK version of the documentation, with more general backgfround documentation
Initial support for Mac OS X
configure support to match Edinburgh Speech Tools