The Festival Speech Synthesis System
                  version 2.0 RELEASE August 2006
 
This directory contains the Festival Speech Synthesis System,
developed at CSTR, University of Edinburgh. The project was originally
started by Alan W Black and Paul Taylor but many others have been
involved (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.

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], 3.2.3 3.3.2 RedHat "gcc-2.96" and gcc 3.3,
3.4, 4.0, 4.0.1 4.1 are our standard compilers) to install. A port to Windows
XP/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/

New in Festival 2.0
   Three new synthesis engines.
     Clustergen - statistical parametric synthesis
     Multisyn - a general purpose unit selection engine.
     HTS - a compact HMM-based engine
   Various new gcc's support
   lots of wee bugs fixed