5.2 Future

Festival is still very much in development. Hopefully this state will continue for a long time. It is never possible to complete software, there are always new things that can make it better. However as time goes on Festival's core architecture will stabilise and little or no changes will be made. Other aspects of the system will gain greater attention such as waveform synthesis modules, intonation techniques, text type dependent analysers etc.

Festival will improve, so don't expected it to be the same six months from now.

A number of new modules and enhancements are already under consideration at various stages of implementation. The following is a non-exhaustive list of what we may (or may not) add to Festival over the next six months or so.

• Selection-based synthesis: Moving away from diphone technology to more generalized selection of units for speech database.
• New structure for linguistic content of utterances: Using techniques for Metrical Phonology we are building more structure representations of utterances reflecting there linguistic significance better. This will allow improvements in prosody and unit selection.
• Non-prosodic prosodic control: For language generation systems and custom tasks where the speech to be synthesized is being generated by some program, more information about text structure will probably exist, such as phrasing, contrast, key items etc. We are investigating the relationship of high-level tags to prosodic information through the Sole project http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/sole.html
• Dialect independent lexicons: Currently for each new dialect we need a new lexicon, we are currently investigating a form of lexical specification that is dialect independent that allows the core form to be mapped to different dialects. This will make the generation of voices in different dialects much easier.