"Building Voices in Festival"

Alan W Black (awb@cs.cmu.edu) and Kevin Lenzo (lenzo@cs.cmu.edu) http://www.festvox.org

The included documentation, scripts and examples should be sufficient for an interested person to build their own synthetic voices in currently supported languages or new languages in the University of Edinburgh's Festival Speech Synthesis System. The quality of the result depends much on the time and skill of the builder. For English it may be possible to build a new voice in a couple of days work, a new language may take months or years to build. It should be noted that even the best voices in Festival (or any other speech synthesis system for that matter) are still nowhere near perfect quality.

This distribution includes Support for designing, recording and autolabelling diphone databases Support for designing, recording and autolabelling unit selection dbs Support for designing, recording and autolabelling statistical parametric synthesis voices Building simple limited domain synthesis engines Support for building rule driven and data driven prosody models (duration, intonation and phrasing) Support for building rule driven and data driven text analysis Lexicon and building Letter to Sound rule support Predefined scripts for building new US (and UK) English voices Scripts for designing and selecting prompts to record in arbitrary languages

New in 2.6

Grapheme based synthesizers (with specific support for large number
  of unicode writing systems)
Clustergen state and stop value optimization
Wavesurfer label support
SPAM F0 support
Phrase break support
Support for SPTK's mgc parameterization

New in 2.3

Support for cygwin tools under Windows
Substantially improved CLUSTERGEN support with mlpg and mlsb

WARNING

This is not a pointy/clicky plug and play program to build new voices. It is instructions with discussion on the problems and an attempt to document the expertise we have gained in building other voices. Although we have tried to automate the task as much as possible this is no substitute for careful correction and understanding of the processes involved. There are significant pointers into the literature throughout the document that allow for more detailed study and further reading.

REQUIREMENTS

A Unix Machine although there is nothing inheritantly Unix about the scripts, no attempt has yet been made about porting this to other platforms Festival and Speech Tools This uses speech tools programs and festival itself at various stages in builidng voices as well as (of course) for the final voices. Festival and the Edinburgh Speech Tools are available from http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ or http://www.festvox.org/festival

It is recommended that you compile your own versions of these
as you will need the libraries and include files to build some
programs in this festvox.

Wavesurfer TO display wavesforms, spectragrams and phoneme labels. Patience and understanding Building a new voice is a lot of work, and something will probably go wrong which may require the repetition of some long boring and tedious process. Even with lots of care a new voice still might just not work. In distributing this document we hope to increase the basic knowledge of synthesis out there and hopefully find people who can improve on this making the processing easier and more reliable in the future.

INSTALLATION

You must have the Edinburgh Speech Tools and Festival instllation before you can build the tools in the festvox distribution.

Unpack festvox-2.6-release.tar.gz

tar zxvf festvox-2.6-release.tar.gz
cd festvox
./configure
make

The configuration basically tries to find your version of the Edinburgh Speech Tools and uses its configuration to set compiler type etc. So you must have that installed. If configure fails try expliciting setting your ESTDIR environment variable to point ot your compiled version of the Speech Tools.

A pre-generated version of the document in html and postscript are distributed in the html/ directory

If you need to build the document itself, you will need a working version of the docbook tools, which may (or may not) already be installed on your system

To build the documenation

cd docbook
make doc

Note that even if the documentation build fails you can still use all the scripts and programs.

To use the scripts and programs in the festvox distribution each user is expected to have the environment variables ESTDIR and FESTVOXDIR set for example as (if you use bash, zsh, ksh or sh)

export ESTDIR=/home/awb/projects/speech_tools export FESTVOXDIR=/home/awb/projects/festvox

Or if you use csh or tcsh

setenv ESTDIR /home/awb/projects/speech_tools setenv FESTVOXDIR /home/awb/projects/festvox

Remember to set these to where your installations are, not ours.