# festvox/flite

A small fast portable speech synthesis system

Repository: https://github.com/festvox/flite
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/flite
Language: C
License: NOASSERTION
License Family: other
Last push: 2024-07-03T04:52:58+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 23/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 3238, "days_push": 791, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_license
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1081, forks 210 (observed 2026-08-28T04:03:30.723823+00:00)

## What it is
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
- artifact type: library
- maturity: stable
- function: tts, speech-recognition, audio-processing, cli
- domain: speech-processing, embedded-systems, cross-platform
- platform: windows, cross-platform, embedded, cli, c
- tags: text-to-speech, speech-synthesis, embedded-tts, cmu, festival, ansic, small-footprint, audio-output, natural-language-processing, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- festvox/flite (main) score 23

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:30.723823+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T06:51:21.364141+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/festvox/flite (fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:30.723823+00:00, sha 48c150f4b588)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.