Festival

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In Brief

Making your computer talk to you is fun.

Vitals

Posted:	14 Mar 2006
License:	Free
Download:	http://festvox.org/festival/downloads.html
Publisher:	Centre for Speech Technology Research - University of Edinburgh, UK, David Crouse

Disclaimer

Please read the note from our friends in legal before using this file.

Details

With festival, you can make your computer talk to you, and read text documents. From the command line the format for reading the document looks like this:

festival --tts yourdoc.txt

Introducing festival to your bash scripts can produce some interesting things. To have what you type speak without having to open and save txt files, I wrote a quick bash script.

#!/bin/bash
# Festival Talker Program
# Takes input from the keyboard and speaks the text.
# This keeps repeating until you end the program with CTRL + C
# Created by Dave Crouse 01-16-2006
clear

talker ()
{
echo "         Festival Talker Program";
echo "--------------------------------------------------"; echo "";
read WHATYOUTYPED
echo $WHATYOUTYPED > whatyoutyped
festival --tts  whatyoutyped
shred -u whatyoutyped ; clear
}

while true
do
talker
done
exit

Another script combines Lynx and Festival to speak webpages.

#/!bin/bash
# Written by Crouse @ bashscripts.org
# Visit specific url with lynx and have festival read it back.
# Works best with pages that are text only, without hyperlinks.
# NOTE: Could create menu system and use sed/awk/grep to clean up pages
before reading
# and allow for the script to loop.
#
# Very basic bash script that combines the use of lynx and festival
#

echo "Please enter a url to visit" > enterurlmsg.txt
festival --tts enterurlmsg.txt
read -p "Please enter a url to visit" urltovisit;
lynx -dump $urltovisit > urltemp.txt
festival --tts urltemp.txt
# Remove temp files
rm urltemp.txt
rm enterurlmsg.txt
exit

Now, instead of just a screen with a text, you can have your computer talk to you.

Check out the Festival Speech Synthesis System documentation for additional information.

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