Festival Speech Synthesis System: - Speech Resource Pages

Close the audio server down but wait until it is cleared. This is useful in scripts etc. when you wish to only
exit when all audio is complete.
(audio_mode 'shutup)
Close the audio down now, stopping the current file being played and any in the queue. Note that this may
take some time to take effect depending on which audio method you use. Sometimes there can be 100s of
milliseconds of audio in the device itself which cannot be stopped.
(audio_mode 'query)
Lists the size of each waveform currently in the queue.
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24. Voices
This chapter gives some general suggestions about adding new voices to Festival. Festival attempts to offer an
environment where new voices and languages can easily be slotted in to the system.
24.1 Current voices Currently available voices
24.2 Building a new voice
24.3 Defining a new voice
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24.1 Current voices
Currently there are a number of voices available in Festival and we expect that number to increase. Each is elected
via a function of the name `voice_*' which sets up the waveform synthesizer, phone set, lexicon, duration and
intonation models (and anything else necessary) for that speaker. These voice setup functions are defined in
`lib/voices.scm'.
The current voice functions are
voice_rab_diphone
A British English male RP speaker, Roger. This uses the UniSyn residual excited LPC diphone synthesizer.
The lexicon is the computer users version of Oxford Advanced Learners' Dictionary, with letter to sound rules
trained from that lexicon. Intonation is provided by a ToBI-like system using a decision tree to predict accent
and end tone position. The F0 itself is predicted as three points on each syllable, using linear regression
trained from the Boston University FM database (f2b) and mapped to Roger's pitch range. Duration is
predicted by decision tree, predicting zscore durations for segments trained from the 460 Timit sentence
spoken by another British male speaker.
voice_ked_diphone
An American English male speaker, Kurt. Again this uses the UniSyn residual excited LPC diphone
synthesizer. This uses the CMU lexicon, and letter to sound rules trained from it. Intonation as with Roger is
trained from the Boston University FM Radio corpus. Duration for this voice also comes from that database.
voice_kal_diphone
An American English male speaker. Again this uses the UniSyn residual excited LPC diphone synthesizer.
And like ked, uses the CMU lexicon, and letter to sound rules trained from it. Intonation as with Roger is
trained from the Boston University FM Radio corpus. Duration for this voice also comes from that database.
This voice was built in two days work and is at least as good as ked due to us understanding the process better.
The diphone labels were autoaligned with hand correction.
voice_don_diphone
Steve Isard's LPC based diphone synthesizer, Donovan diphones. The other parts of this voice, lexicon,
intonation, and duration are the same as voice_rab_diphone described above. The quality of the
diphones is not as good as the other voices because it uses spike excited LPC. Although the quality is not as
good it is much faster and the database is much smaller than the others.