In this practical, students will build a limited domain speech synthesiser based on their own voice, using the Festival speech synthesis toolkit with the Festvox voice-building tools.
The synthesiser uses a type of unit selection in which multiple examples of each unit type are recorded and an algorithm automatically chooses which particular example to use at synthesis time.
The type of unit selection used here is a simplified one, in which the units are whole phones. This works very well for limited domain applications like speaking clocks, reading the weather or sports results, etc. With a little effort, you can build a synthesiser which is better than general unit-selection based TTS (e.g. rVoice which is a direct descendant of Festival) within the limited domain for which it is designed but considerably worse outside that domain."
Online instructions used during the tutorial.