Announcing Festival 1.3.1 Release (fwd)

[Hans Zoebelein <zocki@goldfish.cube.net>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 06:47:08 GMT
From: Alan W Black <awb@cstr.ed.ac.uk>
To: festival-beta@cstr.ed.ac.uk
Subject: Announcing Festival 1.3.1 Release


        The Festival Speech Synthesis System version 1.3.1
         and Edinburgh Speech Tools Library version 1.1.1
                        26th January 1999

Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis
systems as well as including examples of various modules.  As a whole
it offers full text to speech through a number APIs: from shell level,
though a Scheme command interpreter, as a C++ library, and an Emacs
interface.  Festival is multi-lingual (currently English (British and
American), Spanish and Welsh) though English is the most advanced.

The system is written in C++ and uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools
Library for low level architecture and has a Scheme (SIOD) based
command interpreter for control.  Documentation is given in the FSF
texinfo format which can generate, a printed manual, info files and
HTML.

This distribution includes:
   * Full English (British and American English) text to speech
   * Full C++ source for modules, SIOD interpreter, and Scheme library
   * Lexicon based on OALD and CMULEX (distributed with permission)
   * Edinburgh Speech Tools, low level C++ library
   * British English Male (for residual LPC resynthesis 8k and 16k versions)
   * 2 American English Male (for residual LPC resynthesis 8k and 16k versions)
   * Castilian Spanish Male (for residual LPC resynthesis 11k version)
   * British English Male (for spike excited LPC resynthesis 10k version)
   * Full documentation (html, postscript and GNU info format)

Festival version 1.3.1 is available from
    ftp://ftp.cstr.ed.ac.uk/pub/festival/1.3.1/

The Festival home page, offering descriptions of the system, examples
and online demos, can be found at
    http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival.html

Requirements

To run Festival you need:
   * A Unix machine, Festival has compiled and run on Suns (SunOS and 
     Solaris), FreeBSD, Linux, SGIs and DEC Alphas but should be portable
     to any standard Unix machine.
   * A C++ compiler: we have used GCC  version 2.7.2, 2.6.3, or 2.8.1 and
     Sun CC 3.01, 4.1 and 4.2, and egcs.  Other C++ compilers are
     probably possible with perhaps some minor chanages
   * GNU Make any recent version
   * Audio hardware, /dev/audio (8 bit and 16 bit on Suns, Linux 
     and FreeBSD) and NCD's NAS network transparent audio system 
     are supported directly but Festival supports the execution of 
     any Unix command that can play audio files.

There is basic support for building the system under Windows NT and
95.  We have successfully ran the system complied with Cygnus' GNU
win32 package and Microsoft's Visual C++.  However such support is
still young so its not worth attempting to use this unless you are
confident about compiling C++ programs under Windows.

We intend to distribute binariary distributions for major
architectures particularly Linux and Solaris.  We will *not*
distribute binary versions for Windows NT/95 as we do not have enough
expertise to support them.

Restrictions

The system may be used, copied, modified and distributed for free for
research, educational and individual use.  Commercial use requires
prior written permission from the authors.  Research distributions,
bundled with other systems are allowed.  Commercial re-distributions
(e.g. on CDROM with collections of other software) are not implicitly
permitted but will usually be permitted for free if you ask.  We do
intend that later versions may be distributed of such CDROMs without
requiring permission but until we have a more stable system we'd like
to control that.

New in 1.3.1 since 1.3.0 (August 1998)
   * Many small but important bug fixes
   * egcs-1.1.1 support
   * tobi_rules update (GM)
   * replace readline interface with editline (+ extensions)
   * cluster code tidied up
   * new KAL voice, US male
   * improved ked by power normalization
   * updated lexicons with addenda for US and UK 
   * New LTS models for US and UK English

Alan, Paul and Richard
26th January 1999

---
Alan W Black                            email: awb@cstr.ed.ac.uk
Centre for Speech Technology Research   http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/~awb
University of Edinburgh                 tel:   (44) 131 650 2787
80 South Bridge, Edinburgh, UK          fax:   (44) 131 650 6351



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