Festival speech synthesizer on FreeBSD
If you need to implementation of some creative ideas so that your FreeBSD operating system can read text, then we need a speech synthesizer. The FreeBSD operating system can handle this too. In the article, I will be quick to set up a speech synthesizer called Festival.
Festival as for me a synthesizer with acceptable speech quality, compared to espeak, for example. Festival's speech is more legible and less metallic.
You can see how festival sounds in the video below the article, it shows how festival reads text from a file and simply from the console in different languages.
Let's start with the installation festival
pkg install festival
Next, install festvox
pkg install festvox
pkg install festvox-russian
Festival requires a sound server NAS
Install and configure the NAS
pkg install nas
then go to the configuration of the sound server:
cd /usr/local/etc
cp nasd .conf.eg nasd.conf
Create nasd file
mcedit /usr/local/etc/rc.d/nasd
#!/bin/sh
# PROVIDE: nasd
# REQUIRE: DAEMON
# BEFORE: LOGIN
. /etc/rc.subr
name="nasd"
rcvar=`set_rcvar`
command="/usr/local/bin/nasd"
load_rc_config $name
: ${nasd_enable="NO"}
: ${nasd_flags="-aa -b"}
run_rc_command "$1"
Add the line to /etc/rc.conf:
nasd_enable="YES"
And execute:
chmod a+x /usr/local/etc/rc.d/nasd
service nasd start
Now you can check how our festival talker works.
To pronounce the text "Hello" in the console, enter:
echo "hello" | festival --language english —tts
If you need festival to read text from a file, then:
In English:
festival --tts /home/user/text
In Russian:
festival --language russian --tts /home/user/text