1. Motivation

Festival is a powerful and extensible speech synthesis system, able to handle the whole text-to-speech process. The aim of festival-freebsoft-utils is to further extend Festival facilities, to the level providing complete set of features required by Speech Dispatcher: (speech-dispatcher)Top section `Top' in Speech Dispatcher Manual. As a side effect, festival-freebsoft-utils introduces interesting functionality, generalizing the text-to-speech system to a text-to-sound system.

Festival is well suited to the speech synthesis process itself, but lacks some end-user features, especially those needed for application sound output. festival-freebsoft-utils tries to fill this gap, thus making Festival suitable for screen readers and other speech output software, used especially by the blind and visually impaired people.

Main features of festival-freebsoft-utils are:

• Generalized concept of input events. festival-freebsoft-utils allows not only plain text synthesis, but also insertion of sounds and logical event mapping.
• Spell mode.
• Capital letter signalling.
• Punctuation modes, for reading or not reading punctuation characters.
• Function wrapping support.
• Speech Dispatcher Festival output interface. For more information about Speech Dispatcher, see http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd or Speech Dispatcher: (speech-dispatcher)Top section `Top' in Speech Dispatcher manual.

Up-to-date information about festival-freebsoft-utils can be found at its home page http://www.freebsoft.org/festival-freebsoft-utils/.

This document was generated by Milan Zamazal on August, 11 2009 using texi2html 1.78.