---
name: "festival"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "festival"
version: "1:2.5.0-11"
release: "Debian 13 (Trixie)"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/festival"
---

# festival(1)

a text-to-speech system.

## NAME

festival - a text-to-speech system.

## SYNOPSIS

**festival** *\[options\]* *\[file0\]* *\[file1\]* *...*

## DESCRIPTION

Festival is a general purpose text-to-speech system.  As well as  simply rendering text as speech it can be used in an interactive command mode for testing and developing various aspects of speech synthesis technology.

Festival has two major modes, command and tts (text-to-speech). When in command mode input (from file or interactively) is interpreted by the command interpreter.  When in tts mode input is rendered as  speech.  When in command mode filenames that start with a left parenthesis are treated as literal commands and evaluated.

## OPTIONS

- **-q**

  Load no default setup files

- **--datadir** *\<string\>*

  Set data directory pathname

- **--libdir** *\<string\>*

  Set library directory pathname

- **-b**

  Run in batch mode (no interaction)

- **--batch**

  Run in batch mode (no interaction)

- **--tts**

  Synthesize text in files as speech  no files means read from stdin  (implies no interaction by default)

- **-i**

  Run in interactive mode (default)

- **--interactive**

  Run in interactive mode (default)

- **--pipe**

  Run in pipe mode, reading commands from  stdin, but no prompt or return values  are printed (default if stdin not a tty)

- **--language** *\<string\>*

  Run in named language, default is  english, spanish, russian, welsh and others are available

- **--server**

  Run in server mode waiting for clients  of server\_port (1314)

- **--script**

  \<ifile\>  Used in #! scripts, runs in batch mode on  file and passes all other args to Scheme

- **--heap** *\<int\>* **{10000000}**

  Set size of Lisp heap, should not normally need  to be changed from its default

- **-v**

  Display version number and exit

- **--version**

  Display version number and exit

## BUGS

More than you can imagine.

A manual with much detail (though not complete) is available in distributed as part of the system and is also accessible at\
 http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/manual/

Although we cannot guarantee the time required to fix bugs, we would appreciated it if they were reported to \
 festival-bug@cstr.ed.ac.uk

## AUTHOR

Alan W Black, Richard Caley and Paul Taylor\
 (C) Centre for Speech Technology Research, 1996-1998\
 University of Edinburgh\
 80 South Bridge\
 Edinburgh EH1 1HN\
 http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival.html