demo of better voices for festival text to speech

festival is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system that offers a framework for building speech synthesis systems. while the default voices in festival are functional, they may not sound very natural. however, you can enhance the quality of the speech output by using better voice models or by configuring the system to use different voice settings.

### tutorial: using better voices in festival text-to-speech

#### prerequisites

1. **install festival**: ensure you have festival installed on your system. you can install it via package managers:

- **ubuntu/debian**:


- **fedora**:


- **macos**:
use homebrew:


2. **better voices**: to use better voices, you can look for voice packages that can be added to festival. some popular options include:

- **cmu arctic voices**: these voices are known for their quality and natural sound.
- **lj speech dataset**: another set of high-quality voices.

you will need to download these voices and install them into your festival directory.

#### step 1: install better voices

1. **download cmu arctic voices**:
you can download the cmu arctic voices from the official cmu website or directly from repositories (make sure to check the licensing).

after downloading, extract the files and place them in the appropriate festival directory:



2. **verify installation**:
after installation, you can check if the voices are recognized by running festival in interactive mode:



inside the festival shell, run:

this should list all available voices, including the newly installed cmu arctic voices.

#### step 2: using the better voices

you can use the festival command line or script to convert text to speech with the new voice.

1. **command line usage**:
you can specify the voice directly in the command line as follows:



replace `kal_diphone` with the name of the voice you want to use.

2. **script example**:
you can create a simple script in python that uti ...

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