
              The Festival Speech Synthesis System
                version 1.2.95 BETA July 1998

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, Welsh and
Spanish) 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.

NOTE: Festival is a young system and constantly being developed,
this release is not a final polished system and although it has
been checked on many systems, it should still be consider BETA
quality code.

COPYING

Festival is free for research, educational and individual use.  We now
allow redistribution for non-commercial use.  For commercial use (and
distribution) please contact the authors.  Permission to distribute
on CDROMs in software collections requires permission but will
normally be free of charge.  See the file COPYING for more legal stuff

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, 2.6.3, 2.8.1 and egcs are our standard compilers) to install or
Sun's CC compiler (3.01 or 4.1). A preliminary port to Windows NT and
95 using either Cygnus GNUWIN32 and Visual C++ is included but its not
for the beginner.

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

See NEWS file for full details.  Since our last release (1.2.1 October 97)
Festival has had the following notable enhancements

New in Festival 1.2.95
   New diphone synthesizer
   New utterance architecture
   Trained letter to sound rules
   Tilt analysis/synthesis support
   Java support
   Probabilistic grammar parser
   Improved time and space efficiency
