Festival
University of Edinburgh speech synthesis system with decades of research behind it.
About
Festival is a general multilingual speech synthesis framework developed at the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Speech Technology Research, and it remains one of the oldest open-source TTS systems still in use. Written in C++ on top of the Edinburgh Speech Tools library, it exposes several interfaces: a shell-level command, a Scheme command interpreter for scripting the entire system, a C++ library API, and an Emacs interface. Official distributions cover British and American English with Spanish also supported, and the companion FestVox project documents building entirely new voices, which has produced community voices in many other languages. Synthesis methods span unit selection through ClUnits and MultiSyn, the statistical ClusterGen engine, and HTS-based parametric synthesis, all running on CPU on Unix-like systems with Windows support via Cygwin. An X11-style license permits unrestricted commercial and free-software use, which is why Festival has served as a research platform and teaching tool for decades.
Should you use Festival?
Pick it when
Pick Festival for teaching or research on classic speech synthesis, where you want unit selection, ClusterGen, and HTS methods scriptable through Scheme on CPU, under a permissive license that allows commercial redistribution.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if you just want natural speech in an app: official voices cover only British and American English plus Spanish, and modern neural engines like Piper or Kokoro give more natural output with far less setup.
Alternatives to Festival
- eSpeak NG
Smaller and simpler with 100-plus languages and SAPI5 integration, but GPL-3.0 and robotic formant output, with no unit selection research stack.
- Piper TTS
Neural voices across dozens of languages that run on a Raspberry Pi with an HTTP server, far easier to deploy but not a teaching framework.
- VITS
MIT reference implementation of end-to-end neural TTS, the modern baseline to study after Festival's classic pipelines, but training needs a GPU.
- Mozilla TTS
Documented codebase of Tacotron-era models and neural vocoders for studying early neural TTS, though active development moved to Coqui.
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Details
- Category
- Text-to-Speech (TTS)
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Intermediate (3/5)
- License
- BSD
- Added
- Apr 3, 2026