The Centre for Speech Technology Research, The university of Edinburgh

Festival Text-to-Speech Online Demo

Select a Voice Type the text to synthesise (max 70 chars)


This is an interactive demo of CSTR's "Festival" speech synthesiser, which is software capable of making artificial speech in place of a real human. Festival is the most complete freeware multilingual, general-purpose synthesis system available. It is used by numerous research sites and other projects around the world. Further information is available on the Festival project page.

Synthetic speech can be used anywhere pre-recorded speech can, for example telephone call routing and information lines. However, it is equally useful where pre-recorded speech cannot be used. For example, screen-readers for the visually impaired, email/sms reading over the telephone, voice directions for in-car satellite navigation and gaming dialog to name but a few.

The following voices are included in this demo at present: More voices are available (with slightly more details) here.

Further questions...

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, or experience any difficulties using this demo, then please consult the FAQ in the first place. If that doesn't address your query, please mail


(NOTE: This page is provided for demonstration purposes only. Direct use of the CGI synthesis interface is not permitted (computer resources reserved for this demo are limited). The speech audio produced by this demo is for private, non-commercial use only. For further details on our usage policy, see the usage section of the FAQ.)