Native alsa support for flite and eflite

Flite

Festival Lite (flite) is a efficient free text-to-speech system developed at CMU. The current release supports only OSS audio playback on Linux. Here are some patches that add native ALSA support. They were tested with libasound version 1.0.10. The patch for flite 1.3 includes a patch by Francois Aucamp that makes it possible to compile shared libraries of flite 1.3.

eflite

Flite can provide speech output for Emacspeak via eflite. The advantage of using Alsa instead of OSS is that it allows for multiple programs to access the sound device simultaneously, thus you can play other sounds while eflite is talking. This allows you for example to activate auditory icons in emacspeak. You will need at least version 0.4.0 of eflite to use flite with the above patches.

To make testing of this changes to flite and eflite easy, I provide a i386binary of eflite 0.4.0a that includes flite 1.2 with support for Alsa. Instructions of how to test it without losing speech in your current installation of eflite are included.

Please send feedback and reports to listaddr1 (at) gmx dot net.
Last Modified October 31 2006 by Lukas Loehrer