18.6. Text-to-Speech Utilities

Text-to-speech utilities are used to convert strings of words into audio that can be played to your callers. Text-to-speech has been around for many years, and has been continually improving. While we can’t recommend text-to-speech utilities to take the place of professionally recorded prompts, they do offer some degree of usefulness in applications where dynamic data needs to be communicated to a caller.

18.6.1. Festival

Festival is one of the oldest running applications for text-to-speech on Linux. While the quality of Festival is not sufficient for us to recommend it for production use, it is certainly a useful way of testing a text-to-speech-based application. If a more polished sound is required for your application, we recommend you look at Cepstral (covered next).