festival

You are currently browsing articles tagged festival.

Festival on Ubuntu

September 23, 2010 in News by mubin | 1 comment

Ubuntu users will find it quite easy to install and use Festival for Text to Speech. The following link gives the details:

Festival on Ubuntu

We would strongly recommend to use Ubuntu to run TTS. Compiling and building Festival on Windows is quite a task. All of this means that ultimately we are faced with two choices when implementing a complete application for ROILA, since we had configured the Lejos NXT platform on Windows.

  1. Setup lejos on Ubuntu, including Bluetooth support.
  2. Use the text2wave utility in Festival to generate wav files on Ubuntu. These wav files can then be played from within Java when running NXT programs on Windows.

We have prepared a simple script that generates wav files of any number of sentences written in a text file using approach 2. Of course the disadvantage is that TTS is done offline and one would need to know beforehand the plausible list of sentences that the NXT robot could say. If someone has hands on experience with approach 1 please let us know.

Tags: , , ,

First Attempts with Festival for Text to Speech for ROILA

July 27, 2010 in News by mubin | 6 comments

We are pleased to inform you that we have made some progress with getting Festival TTS going for ROILA. As always feedback and comments are welcome. Please note that this is still work in progress.

Here are the initial results (for sake of consistency, we provide audio files of sample sentences that are also discussed elsewhere)

fosit koloke
fosit nole
buse fosit
bama buse fosit
bobuja
fosit jimeja
fosit kipupi
fosit webufo
fosit besati

The output from text to speech was also passed to the Sphinx-4 speech recognizer and the recognition results were good.

Several steps are required to accomplish TTS for ROILA and ultimately to get your audio files. We will post details very soon so that everyone can have their machines talk in ROILA!

Acknowledgement: We would like to thank Steve Pomeroy for providing a sample script of  how to enable Festival to speak in artificial languages. We would also like to thank Alex Juarez for helping in running Festival on Linux.

Tags: ,

Festival Text to Speech and CMU Spice

July 14, 2010 in News by mubin | 2 comments

Currently we are working on the speech synthesis stage of our project. We aim to have a text to speech engine that can speak ROILA at will. For this purpose we are playing around with Festival, which is an open source tts engine. Festival also goes by its CMU name of Festvox. If you have any pointers (practical experience) about the following, please do contact us:

  1. Implementing a new voice in Festival
  2. Implementing a new language in Festival
  3. Employing the use of Festival within the LEGO NXT platform

Moreover we have also found an online tool CMU Spice which provides a platform where new languages can be evaluated from both a speech recognition and a speech synthesis perspective. If you have had a successful experience with it, please do contact us as well.

Tags: , ,