30 Problems

There will be many problems with Festival, both in installation and running it. It is a young system and there is a lot to it. We believe the basic design is sound and problems will be features that are missing or incomplete rather than fundamental ones.

We are always open to suggestions on how to improve it and fix problems, we don't guarantee we'll have the time to fix problems but we are interested in hearing what problems you have.

Before you smother us with mail here is an incomplete list of general problems we have already identified

• The more documentation we write the more we realize how much more documentation is required. Most of the Festival documentation was written by someone who knows the system very well, and makes many English mistakes. A good re-write by some one else would be a good start.
• The system is far too slow. Although machines are getting faster, it still takes too long to start the system and get it to speak some given text. Even so, on reasonable machines, Festival can generate the speech several times faster than it takes to say it. But even if it is five time faster, it will take 2 seconds to generate a 10 second utterance. A 2 second wait is too long. Faster machines would improve this but a change in design is a better solution.
• The system is too big. It takes a long time to compile even on quite large machines, and its foot print is still in the 10s of megabytes as is the run-time requirement. Although we have spent some time trying to fix this (optional modules have made the possibility of building a much smaller binary) we haven't done enough yet.
• The signal quality of the voices isn't very good by today's standard of synthesizers, even given the improvement quality since the last release. This is partly our fault in not spending the time (or perhaps also not having enough expertise) on the low-level waveform synthesis parts of the system. This will improve in the future with better signal processing (under development) and better synthesis techniques (also under development).