Festival is a widely used research toolkit for Text-To-Speech. It is not perfect, and your goal is to discover various types of errors it makes, then understand why they occur.

This assignment has been updated for 2024-25 – enjoy!

These milestones will help you stay on track with this assignment. Try to stay ahead of the milestones.

Overview
An overview of what you will do for this assignment
Getting started
A first look at Festival and how we use it in interactive mode on the command line.
Step-by-step
It's possible to run each step in the text-to-speech pipeline manually, and inspect what Festival does at each point.
Finding mistakes
Festival makes mistakes, of course. Your task is to find interesting ones, and explain why each occurs.
Writing up
Your submission for this assignment will be a written report, analyzing errors made by a specific Festival TTS configuration and discussing the pipeline as a whole.