Editing Festival Speech Synthesis System (1997) (section)

== Introduction ==
Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as well as including examples of various modules, which is originally developed by Alan W. Black, Paul Taylor and Richard Caley at the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) at the University of Edinburgh.<ref name=":0">Taylor, P., Black, A. W., & Caley, R. (1998). The architecture of the Festival speech synthesis system. In ''The third ESCA/COCOSDA workshop (ETRW) on speech synthesis''.</ref> As a whole it offers full text to speech through a number APIs: from shell level, though a Scheme command interpreter, as a C++ library, from Java, and an Emacs interface. Festival is multi-lingual (currently English (British and American), and Spanish) though English is the most advanced. Other groups release new languages for the system. And full tools and documentation for build new voices are available through Carnegie Mellon's [http://festvox.org FestVox project].

The system is written in C++ and uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools Library for low level architecture and has a Scheme (SIOD) based command interpreter for control. Documentation is given in the FSF texinfo format which can generate, a printed manual, info files and HTML.

Festival is free software. Festival and the speech tools are distributed under an X11-type licence allowing unrestricted commercial and non-commercial use alike.<ref>The Centre for Speech Technology Research (2019), Festival., ''www.cstr.ed.ac.uk''.</ref>