STANFORD CS 224S/LINGUIST 281   -     Winter 2009
Homework 2: TTS
Due: January 20, before the start of class.

WARNING: Please read this entire page before you start!!!!!
NOTE: These exercises are from Alan Black's course.

(2.0) Make sure you can get Festival to say "Hello World". Don't wait for this until the night before the homework is due.

(2.1) Make Festival say your entire name (first and last). If Festival doesn't say it correctly, fix it by adding explicit pronunciations to the lexicon. If it does say it correctly, find a friend's name that it doesn't say correctly and add a pronunciation to fix it.

(2.2) Copy 'text2pos' (in /afs/ir.stanford.edu/class/cs224s/newfestival/festival/examples) and modify it to output the number of nouns (of any type) in a given file.

(2.3) Copy 'text2pos' and modify it to output the number of vowels (phoneme vowels not letter vowels) in a given file.

(2.4) Add a token to word rule, to say money values in dollars and cents in a standard full form. For example, given $56.54, you should say "fifty six dollars and fifty four cents". Hints for how to do this are given below.

Please send a plain text e-mail or file containing your code/commands, sample output, and responses to cs224s-win0809-ta@lists.stanford.edu.

Here's various useful hints and helps about getting started

First, what should I read to understand Festival?

Second, where is Festival?

  1. The festival program is downloadable from 
    http://festvox.org/festival/downloads.html
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/downloads/festival/1.95

  2. But in theory it now works on Macs, Windows, and Linux, (although students have had problems in the past with the Windows version, so you may not be able to use that.) So those of you who have linux and probably Macs (and maybe PCs) of their own, you can all download your own copy of Festival.

  3. But for those of you who don't want to have to install it yourselves, the festival program executable is available for you already on AFS at: 
    /afs/ir/class/cs224s/newfestival/festival/bin/festival

    It is compiled for Dell (Intel) LINUX machines. That means it runs on Myth, firebird, and raptor of the Sweet Hall machines; it will not run on the Sun machines in Sweet Hall, only the linux machines. Some of the existing Sweet Hall computers are transferred to the School of Engineering for use in the new labs at Gates (room B08) and Terman (rooms 102-104).

    You can only hear the output from festival if you are physically sitting at the machines listening to the speakers. So you have to go to Sweet Hall, Gates, or Terman. Unless you have remarkably good hearing. Since the sound will come out somewhere in Sweet Hall, Gates, or Terman (Probably startling everyone there).

    If you have access to another Linux machine, some versions of linux come preloaded with Festival. If you can find one that does, (like if you have your own linux machine or something) feel free to use that instead of the class copy of Festival.

  4. If you want to rum Festival on your Mac, Nathan and Patty Sakunkoo have kindly written a script that will download, patch, and compile the latest version of Festival on your Mac. The script is available here. Just run the python script from the directory you want to download Festival to, and it should be done in a few minutes. This script has been tested on Intel Macs running OS X 10.5. Unfortunately, since the patches were provided by students, we cannot fully support them. If you cannot manage to get Festival to compile, try one of the methods above.
  • Third, how to run festival?

    The simplest way to run festival is to create a small "Scheme" script file called "myrules.scm", which has the following first line: 

    (voice_kal_diphone)

    and the lines afterward have your "lex.add.entry" commands.

    Then you run your new file as follows: 

    festival myrules.scm

    For advanced questions, a useful festival script saytime and other examples are in 

    /afs/ir/class/cs224s/newfestival/festival/examples

    I recommend you add the following to your PATH variable: 

    /afs/ir/class/cs224s/newfestival/festival/bin/

    Alan Black's Hints for Exercise 2.0 and 2.1

    Recall that there are three commonly-used ways to run festival: You can have festival synthesize things directly from the shell: 

    echo My name is ... | festival --tts
    or within the command interpreter with the command: 
    (SayText "My name is ...")
    in the command interpreter, or you can write a script like the script example saytime (in "examples/saytime"). If your name is not pronounced properly you can add new entries to the lexicon using the the function lex.add.entry For example the default synthesizer pronounces Ronald Reagan's second name wrongly so we can redefine the pronunciation as 
    (lex.add.entry
 '("reagan" n (((r ey) 1) ((g ax n) 0))))
    To find out what the phoneme set is and possible formats, it is often useful to lookup similar words. Use the lex.lookup function as in 
    (lex.lookup 'reagan)
    then copy the entry changing it as desired. To keep the pronunciation add it to your `.festivalrc' in your home directory. This file is automatically loaded every time you run Festival so then it will always know about your name. Because there are different lexicons for different languages/dialects you must first select the lexicon/voice first before setting the new pronunciation. 
    (voice_kal_diphone)
(lex.add.entry ...)

    But for this homework you should be able to use the default voice, so you probably shouldn't need to reset this.

    Alan Black's Hints for Exercise 2.2 

    (set! total_ns (+ 1 total_ns))
  (format t "Total number of nouns %d\n" total_ns)

    Alan Black's Hints for Exercise 2.3 

    # See `/afs/ir/class/cs224s/newfestival/festival/lib/synthesis.scm' for the definition of Tokens UttType for list of extra modules to call. You want to look at the Segment relation

(if (string-equal (item.feat seg "ph_vc") "+")
    (set! total_vs (+ 1 total_vs))
)

    Alan Black's Hints for Exercise 2.4

    You will need to add a new definition for token_to_words. The normal convention here is to save the existing one and call that for things that don't match what you are looking for. Thus your file will look something like 

    (set! previous_token_to_words token_to_words)

(define (token_to_words token name)
   (cond
     ;; here insert the condition to recognize money tokens
     ;; return list of words 
    (t
     (previous_token_to_words token name))))

    Another hint: use previous_token_to_words to do the hard parts (e.g., converting 56 to "fifty six" and 54 to "fifty four"). Your code should just do the easy part (adding the "dollars" and "cents" in the right places).

    Another hint: once you decide on the condition, remember that you need to return a list of words.

    A final bit on using the Sweet Hall Linux machines remotely

    Those of you who don't have local Linux access and want to use festival on the Linux machines remotely may have noticed that if you run festival remotely to Sweet Hall, you can't hear the sound. Unless you have remarkably good hearing. Since it comes out somewhere in Sweet Hall. (Probably startling everyone there).

    The following is instructions for how to make festival store the sound in a file so you can open it locally. Those of you using Macs may have to do this if you can't get the Mac sound to work.

    In your home directory (on whatever machine you are running festival from), put a .festivalrc file with the following three lines 

    (Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Required_Format 'wav)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "cp $FILE myfilename.wav")

    Name your file whatever you want (and if you are properly kerberos logged-in, you can use an AFS path to put it someplace you can get it without having to sftp or scp it).

    Hopefully this will work for you! I learned this from the Festival Manual section 6.3, which has some further information. If you can't get it to work, you might have to run your homework on a Linux machine at the actual console.