Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as well as including examples of various modules. As a whole it offers full text to speech through a number APIs: from shell level, though a Scheme command interpreter, as a C++ library, and an Emacs interface. Festival is multi-lingual (currently English (US and UK) and Spanish are distributed but a host of other voices have been developed by others) though English is the most advanced. The system is written in C++ and uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools for low level architecture and has a Scheme (SIOD) based command interpreter for control. Documentation is given in the FSF texinfo format which can generate, a printed manual, info files and HTML.