How to install and use latest Nitech HTS voices for festival on Ubuntu 20.04

Notice

There seems to be a bit of misunderstanding on your side... The Nitech HTS 2.3.2 which was released in 2017 is a speech synthesis system/engine which uses deep learning and neural networks to train speech modules based on datasets like these... The resulting modules can then be built for use with different speech engines including festivals. It is not a group of voices that you can download and use with festival.

Pre-built voice modules are available on the Internet. So you can either use the pre-built voices available in the link below as well as the ones provided by the links in your comment above or you can go ahead and build your own and you can start from here.Please notice thee following on that page:

These distibutions include Festival CLUNITS based voices. bdl, slt, jmk and awb HTS based voices are available from available from http://hts.ics.nitech.ac.jp/ using Nagoya Institute of Technology's HTS HMM-based Speech Synthesis System.

So the voices are already pre-built and available for festival 2.5.0 since the year 2017 on this link

Please also keep in mind that setting the right environment, training and building is a lengthy process that might take days and a lot of resources and effort.

Adding pre-built voices to Festival (Version 2.5.0:release December 2017)

Festival voices go under /usr/share/festival/voices/ and the voices you refer to are linked here. To add and use new pre-built voices, please follow the instructions below:

• Cleate a new directory for the new voices like so:

  sudo mkdir /usr/share/festival/voices/my_voices
  

• cd to your Downloads directory like so:

  cd ~/Downloads
  

• Donload desired voice from here like so:

  wget http://www.festvox.org/packed/festival/2.5/voices/festvox_cmu_us_aew_cg.tar.gz
  

• Extract the downloaded voice file like so:

  tar -xf festvox_cmu_us_aew_cg.tar.gz
  

• Copy the new downloaded voice located under festival/lib/voices/us/ in the extracted file to festivals voices like so:

  sudo cp -r festival/lib/voices/us/cmu_us_aew_cg/ /usr/share/festival/voices/my_voices/
  

• Start festival like so:

  festival
  

• List the available voices like so:

  (voice.list)
  

• The output will look like this:

  (cmu_us_aew_cg kal_diphone)
  

• Select the newly added voice by adding voice_ prefix before its name like so:

  (voice_cmu_us_aew_cg)
  

• Test the new voice like so:

  (SayText "This is how you add new voices to Festival.")