Festival Speech Synthesis System: - Speech Resource Pages

To convert a symbol whose print name is a number to a number use parse-number. This is the equivalent to
atof in C.
Note that, all i/o from Scheme input files is assumed to be basically some form of Scheme data (though can be just
numbers, tokens). For more elaborate analysis of incoming data it is possible to use the text tokenization functions
which offer a fully programmable method of reading data.
[ < ] [ > ] [ > ] [Top] [Contents] [Index] [ ? ]
9. TTS
Festival supports text to speech for raw text files. If you are not interested in using Festival in any other way except
as black box for rendering text as speech, the following method is probably what you want.
festival --tts myfile
This will say the contents of `myfile'. Alternatively text may be submitted on standard input
echo hello world | festival --tts
cat myfile | festival --tts
Festival supports the notion of text modes where the text file type may be identified, allowing Festival to process the
file in an appropriate way. Currently only two types are considered stable: STML and raw, but other types such as
email, HTML, Latex, etc. are being developed and discussed below. This follows the idea of buffer modes in
Emacs where a file's type can be utilized to best display the text. Text mode may also be selected based on a
filename's extension.
Within the command interpreter the function tts is used to render files as text; it takes a filename and the text mode
as arguments.
9.1 Utterance chunking From text to utterances
9.2 Text modes Mode specific text analysis
9.3 Example text mode An example mode for reading email
[ < ] [ > ] [ > ] [Top] [Contents] [Index] [ ? ]
9.1 Utterance chunking
Text to speech works by first tokenizing the file and chunking the tokens into utterances. The definition of utterance
breaks is determined by the utterance tree in variable eou_tree. A default version is given in `lib/tts.scm'.
This uses a decision tree to determine what signifies an utterance break. Obviously blank lines are probably the most
reliable, followed by certain punctuation. The confusion of the use of periods for both sentence breaks and
abbreviations requires some more heuristics to best guess their different use. The following tree is currently used
which works better than simply using punctuation.