Festival
University of Edinburgh speech synthesis system with decades of research behind it.
About
Festival is a general multilingual speech synthesis framework developed at the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Speech Technology Research, and it remains one of the oldest open-source TTS systems still in use. Written in C++ on top of the Edinburgh Speech Tools library, it exposes several interfaces: a shell-level command, a Scheme command interpreter for scripting the entire system, a C++ library API, and an Emacs interface. Official distributions cover British and American English with Spanish also supported, and the companion FestVox project documents building entirely new voices, which has produced community voices in many other languages. Synthesis methods span unit selection through ClUnits and MultiSyn, the statistical ClusterGen engine, and HTS-based parametric synthesis, all running on CPU on Unix-like systems with Windows support via Cygwin. An X11-style license permits unrestricted commercial and free-software use, which is why Festival has served as a research platform and teaching tool for decades.
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Details
- Category
- Text-to-Speech (TTS)
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Intermediate (3/5)
- License
- BSD
- Added
- Apr 3, 2026
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