Festival is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis

Speech synthesis

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware...

 system originally developed by Alan W. Black

Alan W. Black

Alan W Black is a Scottish computer scientist, known for his research on speech synthesis. He is an associate professor in the Language Technology Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania....

 at Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) at the University of Edinburgh

University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...

. Substantial contributions have also been provided by Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....

 and other sites. It is distributed under a free software license similar to the BSD License.

It offers a full text to speech system with various APIs, as well as an environment for development and research of speech synthesis techniques.