Building Festival TTS on Fedora Quick note

February 25th, 2018

The Festival packages on Fedora are Broken

Some work has taken place in the upstream tar-balls to upgrade to make the code work with the newer gcc, but this doesn’t seem to have made it into the RPMs yet.

Building Festival locally

As root you just need :

dnf install ncurses-devel

And then as a user on the command line:

mkdir festival-local
cd festival-local  # This is where we'll build festival locally

Download the source(s) and a suitable voice

# https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1457878
# http://festvox.org/packed/festival/2.5/
wget http://festvox.org/packed/festival/2.5/speech_tools-2.5.0-release.tar.gz
wget http://festvox.org/packed/festival/2.5/festival-2.5.0-release.tar.gz
wget http://festvox.org/packed/festival/2.5/festlex_CMU.tar.gz
wget http://www.festvox.org/packed/festival/2.4/festlex_POSLEX.tar.gz
#wget http://festvox.org/packed/festival/2.5/voices/festvox_cmu_us_clb_cg.tar.gz  # Not found by default_voices.sh
wget http://festvox.org/packed/festival/2.5/voices/festvox_cmu_us_slt_cg.tar.gz

Actually, ‘nina’ would be a better voice, but download is difficult to find…

Unpack everything

tar -xzf  speech_tools*.tar.gz
tar -xzf  festival*.tar.gz
tar -xzf  festlex_CMU.tar.gz
tar -xzf  festlex_POSLEX.tar.gz
tar -xzf  festvox_cmu_us_slt_cg.tar.gz

Build speech_tools

cd speech_tools
./configure
gmake
cd ..

Build festival itself

cd festival
./configure
gmake
cd ..

Test festival on command line

cd festival/bin

# Try the simplest invocation (to audio output)
echo "This is a test" | ./festival --tts  # Needs /dev/dsp => FAIL

# Send instead to a local WAV file : WORKS!!
echo "This is a test" | ./text2wave -o test.wav
# Output is a mono WAV at 16KHz

Install festival system-wide (?)

It wasn’t necessary to install festival nor speech_tools system-wide in order to get the TTS functionality required.

All done.

Martin Andrews

{Finance, Software, AI} entrepreneur, living in Singapore with my family.

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