festvox/flite

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1081 stars · 210 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Flite (festival-lite) is a small, fast, portable run-time text-to-speech synthesis engine written entirely in ANSI C by Carnegie Mellon University. It ships as both a linkable library and a CLI that synthesizes text or files to audio devices or waveform files, with voices compiled into the binary for near-zero startup delay.

Use cases

• add text-to-speech to an embedded device or phone
• convert text files to spoken audio from the command line
• embed a lightweight TTS engine in a C application
• serve many concurrent TTS synthesis requests on a server
• run speech synthesis on low-memory hardware under 1MB
• generate waveform files from text programmatically

When to choose

• you need a tiny, fast, portable TTS engine in pure C
• targeting embedded or resource-constrained devices
• you need thread-safe synthesis with no startup delay
• you want voices linked into ROM or loaded from a single file

When to avoid

• you need highly customizable run-time voices or languages (use Festival)
• you want modern neural TTS quality
• you prefer higher-level languages or easy run-time customization
• you need extensive voice variety out of the box

Facets

library · maturity stable

tts speech-recognition audio-processing cli speech-processing embedded-systems cross-platform windows cross-platform embedded cli c text-to-speech speech-synthesis embedded-tts cmu festival ansic small-footprint audio-output natural-language-processing linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="festvox/flite")