no voice output in Festival

Question

I have just installed the Festival 2.5.0, and in its interface when I type (SayText "hello"), I get no output sound at all. It only gives me this error:

festival> (SayText "hello")

FindNextComponent

Error setting input audio stream format.

#<Utterance 0x136893780>

I have tried different (Parameter.set) and all of them did not work.

However, when I type this following code, I could generate the wavefile in my local laptop and has no problem hearing it:

(set! myutt (Utterance Text "test"))

(utt.synth myutt)

(utt.save.wave myutt "myutt.wav" 'riff)

I am completely new in Festival and I have no clue why this error occurs. How could I fix this problem?

Answer 1

Not sure what operating system you are on, but I had the same problem on macOS. My solution was to set the following parameters from the Festival prompt:

(Parameter.set 'Audio_Required_Format 'riff)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "afplay $FILE")
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)

After that I could say ‘hello’ with:

(SayPhones '(pau hh ax l ow pau))

If you are on Linux, you could attempt to install sox and replace afplay with play in the Parameter.set call above.