## 5 Overview ¶

Festival is designed as a speech synthesis system for at least three levels of user. First, those who simply want high quality speech from arbitrary text with the minimum of effort. Second, those who are developing language systems and wish to include synthesis output. In this case, a certain amount of customization is desired, such as different voices, specific phrasing, dialog types etc. The third level is in developing and testing new synthesis methods.

This manual is not designed as a tutorial on converting text to speech but for documenting the processes and use of our system. We do not discuss the detailed algorithms involved in converting text to speech or the relative merits of multiple methods, though we will often give references to relevant papers when describing the use of each module.

For more general information about text to speech we recommend Dutoit’s `An introduction to Text-to-Speech Synthesis` dutoit97. For more detailed research issues in TTS see sproat98 or vansanten96.