Re: [orca-list] Festival

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

If you ever heard a Braille 'n Speak from the 1990's, Festival's default 
English voice kinda sounds like that, but with slightly better 
inflection. Other languages may work better, but I'm not sure. If you 
have eSpeak working, I would recommend sticking with it. Festival can 
run other voices, but I'm not sure that they are supported by 
speech-dispatcher, and the last time I tried to get an alternate 
Festival voice speaking, which granted was several years ago, 
speech-dispatcher was by far the easiest way to try to configure it, as 
Festival's configuration files are not as easy to read as other speech 
synthesizers. Having said this, if you can get Festival talking and can 
figure out how it works, it is quite extensible, and it is even possible 
to create new voice data for it in any language you speak. The default 
voices are probably not as good as eSpeak, but because of its 
extensibility, it has great potential.

On a related note, I thought it used to be possible to get FreeTTS, 
which if I remember correctly, is a Java reimplementation of Festival, 
working in speech-dispatcher. Is this still possible/does FreeTTS even 
work now? Or is it rather pointless to try to make it work if one 
already has Festival talking?
~Kyle