
              The Festival Speech Synthesis System
               version 1.4.2 RELEASE July 2001
 
This directory contains the Festival Speech Synthesis System,
developed at CSTR, University of Edinburgh by Alan W Black, Richard
Caley and Paul Taylor and others (see ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS file for full
list).

Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis
systems as well as including examples of various modules.  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, and an Emacs
interface.  Festival is multi-lingual (currently English (US and UK)
and Spanish are distributed but a host of other voices have been
developed by others) though English is the most advanced.

The system is written in C++ and uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools
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.

With this release we wish to remember Dr Mike W Macon of OGI who
passed away in March 2001.  Mike was one of the first non-Edinburgh
people to take on Festival and make substantial improvements.  His
diphone voice and LPC code (mwm_diphone/OGIresLPC) is one of the best
diphone voices in the system.  We worked closely him and enjoyed and
number of joint visits, and we acknowledge his help with the whole
system.  However his code, and his voice will continue to speak to
us.

COPYING

Festival is free.  Earlier versions were restricted to non-commercial
use but we have now relaxed those conditions.  The licence is an X11
style licence thus it can be incorporated in commercial products
and free source products without restriction.  See COPYING for the
actual details.

INSTALL

Festival should run on any standard Unix platform.  It has already run
on Solaris, SunOS, Linux and FreeBSD.  It requires a C++ compiler (GCC
2.7.2, 2.8.1, 2.95.[123], RedHat "gcc-2.96" and egcs are our standard
compilers) to install. A port to Windows NT/95/98 and 2000 using
either Cygnus GNUWIN32 and Visual C++ is included, this is still new
but many people are successfully using it.

A detailed description of installation and requirements for the whole
system is given in the file INSTALL read that for details.

NEWS

Keep abreast of Festival News by regularly checking the Festival homepage
   http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival.html
or the US site
   http://festvox.org/festival/

There has been quite a pause since the last release not unrelated to
the core group moving to new jobs in various parts of the planet.  But
from spring 2001 active support has restarted and there should be more
release more often in the future.

New in Festival 1.4.2
   Various new gcc's support
   Visual C++ 6.0 support
   uses configure (though could do so even more)
    substantial updates to the clunits unit selection module
     a simple talking clock voice is included in the release
     more general unit selection voices will follow
   lots of wee bugs fixed
   a few very hard bugs fixed 
     (client/server race condition)
     (dropped bytes in reading files when machine overloaded)
     (FreeBSD memory/gc problem)
   default waverform type is now RIFF.

