Build independent applications using HTK or Festival

[Pilar O]

Hi Simon,
I’m wandering if in the case that we want to build an application using HTK or Festival, but in order to use it independently from these software, as an autonomous programme, what do we have to do? is it possible?
First, I would need to get those installed on my computer that uses Windows and you wrote that is difficult or complicated to do that…
Second, is there a way to turn all those files and process we use in the lab into a programme that anybody could use in any computer or even in a mobile or any other device…
Third, on the Internet there are other toolkits or softwares like these which can be used in the way I’m thinking, is there any of those that would be worth to try instead of trying to use Festival or HTK in my computer?
Thank you!

[Simon]

Several questions there, so let’s deal with them one-by-one.

Running HTK and Festival on Windows

HTK is straightforward to compile on various operating systems (it’s written in plain C), so should be usable on Windows. You might want to install Cygwin, to get a ‘unix-like’ environment.

Festival is trickier – not impossible, but painful and I do not recommend wasting time on this because you can simply run a virtual Linux machine on your Windows computer.

These seem to be a pretty clear set of instructions. After installing Virtual Box (this is the ‘host’ software), you can download an image (basically a snapshot of a hard drive) of a Linux machine here:

https://virtualboximages.com/VirtualBox+Scientific+Linux+Images

https://virtualboximages.com/Scientific+Linux+7+x86_64+Desktop+VirtualBox+Virtual+Computer

and just load it in to Virtual Box. You will then need to install software on that Linux machine

[Simon]

Making applications based on HTK

You need to be careful about the license conditions, which forbid you from redistributing HTK. I think it is fine to distribute models trained with HTK though. There is an API for building real-time applications around HTK, called ATK (and aimed at spoken dialogue systems).

[Simon]

Making applications based on Festival

Festival has a very liberal license that allows you to do almost anything you like (except remove the headers in the source code that say who wrote it). The only practical problem would be speed and memory usage.

There is a faster and simpler system related to Festival, called flite. To make a voice for flite, you need to use the festvox voice building process, but you can start from the same data that you might have collected when building a Festival voice using the multisyn unit selection method.

[Simon]

Packaging a speech synthesis voice

Some operating systems provide a way to plug in your own voice, and make it available to all applications on that computer. In Windows, this is called SAPI.

There is no freely-available SAPI5 wrapper for Festival at the current time.

[Author]

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