Festcat - Catalan Speech Synthesis

Using FestCat

There are several front-ends to be used with Festival, as gnopernicus, or emacs-speak... Here we only mention the direct use of Festival.

Direct usage using Festival

Festival expects ISO-8859-15 encoding. Be sure that you use this encoding in your terminal or files. If your system uses UTF-8 (as do many distributions today) you need to convert the file before reading. Some front-ends, as gnopernicus, do the conversions for you.

You can use the "save as" options in gedit; or use programs to convert the format, as iconv:

    $ iconv -f utf8 -t ISO-8859-15//TRANSLIT myfile_utf8.text > myfile_latin1.text

• A quick test:

  $ echo "Bon dia, Catalunya" | festival --tts --language catalan
  

• You can also execute Festival in interactive way:

  $ festival
  (language_catalan)
  (intro-catalan)
  (SayText "Bon dia, Catalunya.")
  (SayText "Bona nit.")
  (quit)
  

• If you want to specify the speaker, introduce the command to select the speaker instead of the language selection command; or just use it to change the speaker:

  (voice_upc_ca_ona_hts)
  (SayText "I tu, qui ets?")
  (voice_upc_ca_pau_hts)
  (SayText "Jo sóc, el que tu ets, i si et faig mal, em faig mal a mi mateix.")
  (voice_upc_ca_ona_hts)
  (SayText "Que maco. Això és de l'assemblea dels infants, oi?")
  (quit)
  

• Or to read a text file, for instance bon_dia.txt:

  $ echo "Bon dia, Catalunya." > bon_dia.txt
  $ festival
  (language_catalan)
  (tts_file "bon_dia.txt")
  (quit)
  

  • Or use the text2wave script to create a .wav file:

    $ text2wave -o bondia.wav -eval '(language_catalan)' bon_dia.txt

  • If you want to specify the speaker:

    $ text2wave -o bondia.wav -eval '(voice_upc_ca_ona_hts)' bon_dia.txt