Requirements - Festival Speech Synthesis System

6.1 Requirements

In order to compile Festival you first need the following source packages

festival-1.4.3-release.tar.gz: Festival Speech Synthesis System source
speech_tools-1.2.3-release.tar.gz: The Edinburgh Speech Tools Library
festlex_NAME.tar.gz: The lexicon distribution, where possible, includes the lexicon input file as well as the compiled form, for your convenience. The lexicons have varying distribution policies, but are all free except OALD, which is only free for non-commercial use (we are working on a free replacement). In some cases only a pointer to an ftp'able file plus a program to convert that file to the Festival format is included.
festvox_NAME.tar.gz: You'll need a speech database. A number are available (with varying distribution policies). Each voice may have other dependencies such as requiring particular lexicons
festdoc_1.4.3.tar.gz: Full postscript, info and html documentation for Festival and the Speech Tools. The source of the documentation is available in the standard distributions but for your conveniences it has been pre-generated.

In addition to Festival specific sources you will also need

A UNIX machine

Currently we have compiled and tested the system under Solaris (2.5(.1), 2.6, 2.7 and 2.8), SunOS (4.1.3), FreeBSD (3.x, 4.x), Linux (Redhat 4.1, 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 6.[012], 7.[01], 8.0 and other Linux distributions), and it should work under OSF (Dec Alphas), SGI (Irix), HPs (HPUX). But any standard UNIX machine should be acceptable. We have now successfully ported this version to Windows NT and Windows 95 (using the Cygnus GNU win32 environment). This is still a young port but seems to work.

A C++ compiler

Note that C++ is not very portable even between different versions of the compiler from the same vendor. Although we've tried very hard to make the system portable, we know it is very unlikely to compile without change except with compilers that have already been tested. The currently tested systems are

Sun Sparc Solaris 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.6, 2.7, 2.9: GCC 2.95.1, GCC 3.2
FreeBSD for Intel 3.x and 4.x: GCC 2.95.1, GCC 3.0
Linux for Intel (RedHat 4.1/5.0/5.1/5.2/6.0/7.x/8.0): GCC 2.7.2, GCC 2.7.2/egcs-1.0.2, egcs 1.1.1, egcs-1.1.2, GCC 2.95.[123], GCC "2.96", GCC 3.0, GCC 3.0.1 GCC 3.2 GCC 3.2.1
Windows NT 4.0: GCC 2.7.2 plus egcs (from Cygnus GNU win32 b19), Visual C++ PRO v5.0, Visual C++ v6.0

Note if GCC works on one version of Unix it usually works on others.

We have compiled both the speech tools and Festival under Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 95 using the GNU tools available from Cygnus.

          ftp://ftp.cygnus.com/pub/gnu-win32/.

GNU make

Due to there being too many different make programs out there we have tested the system using GNU make on all systems we use. Others may work but we know GNU make does.

Audio hardware

You can use Festival without audio output hardware but it doesn't sound very good (though admittedly you can hear less problems with it). A number of audio systems are supported (directly inherited from the audio support in the Edinburgh Speech Tools Library): NCD's NAS (formerly called netaudio) a network transparent audio system (which can be found at ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/audio/nas/); /dev/audio (at 8k ulaw and 8/16bit linear), found on Suns, Linux machines and FreeBSD; and a method allowing arbitrary UNIX commands. See Audio output.

Earlier versions of Festival mistakenly offered a command line editor interface to the GNU package readline, but due to conflicts with the GNU Public Licence and Festival's licence this interface was removed in version 1.3.1. Even Festival's new free licence would cause problems as readline support would restrict Festival linking with non-free code. A new command line interface based on editline was provided that offers similar functionality. Editline remains a compilation option as it is probably not yet as portable as we would like it to be.

In addition to the above, in order to process the documentation you will need TeX, dvips (or similar), GNU's makeinfo (part of the texinfo package) and texi2html which is available from http://wwwcn.cern.ch/dci/texi2html/.

However the document files are also available pre-processed into, postscript, DVI, info and html as part of the distribution in festdoc-1.4.X.tar.gz.

Ensure you have a fully installed and working version of your C++ compiler. Most of the problems people have had in installing Festival have been due to incomplete or bad compiler installation. It might be worth checking if the following program works if you don't know if anyone has used your C++ installation before.

     #include <iostream.h>
     int main (int argc, char **argv)
     {
        cout << "Hello world\n";
     }

Unpack all the source files in a new directory. The directory will then contain two subdirectories

     speech_tools/
     festival/