[asterisk-users] cepstral vs festival

[Steve Edwards]

> From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
> [mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Eric Fort
> Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 3:53 AM
> To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
> Subject: [asterisk-users] cepstral vs festival
>
> I'm about to begin working on an ivr project to do database backed
> scheduling.  I would like to use text to speech in some places.  What are
> the differences in using festival vs. Cepstral?  How are they similar, how
> are they different?  Is one really better than the other?  How and Why?

On Tue, 2 Dec 2008, Matt Gibson wrote:

> In my experience cepstral has always had much nicer sounding voices, but I
> haven't tinkered too much with either. There is a reason one is pay and one
> free though J I believe cepstral is still offering demo's, I'd download each
> and see which one gives you the performance you're looking for.

Way back in the day, festival was awful and Cepstral as almost acceptable.

Now, especially with their Allison font, Cepstral is good enough than you 
can't always tell the difference -- even without using their markup 
language. The "fit" with the "live" Allison's prompts included with 
Asterisk is great.

It's fantastic for demos. You can refine the wording of your prompts 
before committing to "live talent." You may decide that the tts prompts 
are good enough.

I invoke swift (Cepstral's command line tts tool) to create my prompts 
from my makefile so it's easy to make changes and everything is 
documented.

Thanks in advance,
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Edwards      sedwards at sedwards.com      Voice: +1-760-468-3867 PST
Newline                                             Fax: +1-760-731-3000