festival-freebsoft-utils is a collection of Festival utilities that
enhance Festival with some useful features.  They provide all what is
needed for interaction with Speech Dispatcher.

Key festival-freebsoft-utils features are:

- Generalized concept of input events.  festival-freebsoft-utils
  allows not only plain text synthesis, but also combining it with
  sounds.  Additionally, mechanism of logical events mapped to other
  events is provided.

- Substitution of events for given words.

- High-level voice selection mechanism and setting of basic prosodic
  parameters.

- Spelling mode.

- Capital letter signalization.

- Punctuation modes, for explicit reading or not reading punctuation
  characters.

- Incremental synthesis of texts and events.

- Speech Dispatcher support.

- Rudimentary SSML support.

- Enhancing the Festival extension language with some functions
  commonly used in Lisp.  Support for wrapping already defined
  Festival functions by your own code.

- Everything is written in the extension language, no patching of the
  Festival C++ sources is needed.

All the functionality is under development.  Some things could be done in a
better way, any help is welcome.

You can contact us on the mailing list speechd@freebsoft.org.


REQUIREMENTS

- Festival 1.4.3.

- SoX.

- iconv. 


INSTALLATION

- Copy all the *.scm files to a directory contained in the Festival's
  load-path.  (Type `load-path' in Festival to view the directory list.)


USAGE

Look at the festival-freebsoft-utils manual in festival-freebsoft-utils.info.


-- Milan Zamazal <pdm@freebsoft.org>
