Festival Speech Synthesis System: - Speech Resource Pages

command interpreter. Without this option `-b' Festival will load `hello.scm' and then accept commands on
standard input. This can be convenient when some initial set up is required for a session.
Note one disadvantage of the batch method is that time is required for Festival's initialisation every time it starts up.
Although this will typically only be a few seconds, for saying short individual expressions that lead in time may be
unacceptable. Thus simply executing the commands within an already running system is more desirable, or using the
server/client mode.
Of course its not just about strings of commands, because Scheme is a fully functional language, functions, loops,
variables, file access, arithmetic operations may all be carried out in your Scheme programs. Also, access to Unix is
available through the system function. For many applications directly programming them in Scheme is both the
easiest and the most efficient method.
A number of example Festival scripts are included in `examples/'. Including a program for saying the time, and
for telling you the latest news (by accessing a page from the web). Also see the detailed discussion of a script
example in See section 29.1 POS Example.
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28.2 Shell API
The simplest use of Festival (though not the most powerful) is simply using it to directly render text files as speech.
Suppose we have a file `hello.txt' containing
Hello world. Isn't it excellent weather
this morning.
We can simply call Festival as
unix$ festival --tts hello.txt
Or for even simpler one-off phrases
unix$ echo "hello " | festival --tts
This is easy to use but you will need to wait for Festival to start up and initialise its databases before it starts to render
the text as speech. This may take several seconds on some machines. A socket based server mechanism is provided in
Festival which will allow a single server process to start up once and be used efficiently by multiple client programs.
Note also the use of Sable for marked up text, see section 10. XML/SGML mark-up. Sable allows various forms of
additional information in text, such as phrasing, emphasis, pronunciation, as well as changing voices, and inclusion
of external waveform files (i.e. random noises). For many application this will be the preferred interface method.
Other text modes too are available through the command line by using auto-text-mode-alist.
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28.3 Server/client API
Festival offers a BSD socket-based interface. This allows Festival to run as a server and allow client programs to
access it. Basically the server offers a new command interpreter for each client that attaches to it. The server is forked
for each client but this is much faster than having to wait for a Festival process to start from scratch. Also the server
can run on a bigger machine, offering much faster synthesis.
Note: the Festival server is inherently insecure and may allow arbitrary users access to your machine.