## 9 TTS ¶

Festival supports text to speech for raw text files. If you are not interested in using Festival in any other way except as black box for rendering text as speech, the following method is probably what you want.

    festival --tts myfile

This will say the contents of `myfile`. Alternatively text may be submitted on standard input

    echo hello world | festival --tts
    cat myfile | festival --tts

Festival supports the notion of text modes where the text file type may be identified, allowing Festival to process the file in an appropriate way. Currently only two types are considered stable: `STML` and `raw`, but other types such as `email`, `HTML`, `Latex`, etc. are being developed and discussed below. This follows the idea of buffer modes in Emacs where a file’s type can be utilized to best display the text. Text mode may also be selected based on a filename’s extension.

Within the command interpreter the function `tts` is used to render files as text; it takes a filename and the text mode as arguments.