
              The Festival Speech Synthesis System
               version 1.4.1 RELEASE November 1999
 
This directory contains the Festival Speech Synthesis System,
developed at CSTR, University of Edinburgh by Alan W Black, Richard
Caley and Paul Taylor and others (see ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS file for full
list).

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, Welsh and
Spanish) though English is the most advanced.

The system is written in C++ and uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools
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.

NOTE: Festival is a young system and constantly being developed,
this release is not a final polished system and although it has
been checked on many systems, it should still be consider BETA
quality code.

COPYING

Festival is free.  Previous versions were restricted to non-commercial
use but we have now relaxed those conditions.  The licence is an X11
style licence thus it can be incorporated in commercial products
and free source products without restriction.  See COPYING for the
actual details.

INSTALL

Festival should run on any standard Unix platform.  It has already run
on Solaris, SunOS, Linux and FreeBSD.  It requires a C++ compiler (GCC
2.7.2, 2.8.1, 2.95.1 and egcs are our standard compilers) to install
or Sun's CC compiler (4.1). A preliminary port to Windows NT and 95
using either Cygnus GNUWIN32 and Visual C++ is included, this is stil
new but many people are successfully using it.

A detailed description of installation and requirements for the whole
system is given in the file INSTALL read that for details.

NEWS

Keep abreast of Festival News by regularly checking the Festival homepage
   http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival.html

See NEWS file for full details.  Since our last release (1.4.0 June 99),
this is a minor release to fix known bugs and few small enhancements.

New in Festival 1.4.1
   SSFF (for emulabel) track support
   AIX support
   Java fixes
   various minor bug fixes
   WFST with proper quoting
   Wagon sample counts
   gcc-2.95.1 support

