Suggestions for optimal use of the Text to speech

engine
Captivate 4 introduced text to speech (TTS) technology in Rapid eLearning authoring.
Given the adoption and feedback, in Captivate 5 weve introduced more voices. Tweaking
these voices seem to be one of the most discussed topics on our forums. There were a
couple of blog posts last year on tweaking the Captivate 4 voices (VTML tags, User
dictionary). These continue to be applicable in Captivate 5 for the NeoSpeech voices. Our
other partner, Loquendo, also offers the ability to insert commands in the input text to
modify the way words are pronounced. In the next week, we will have a few posts
detailing this. But prior to that, here are some best practices to follow when using textto-speech:
The TTS process exploits only a subset of the complex knowledge base on which a human
reader implicitly relies. While it can access grammatical and phonetic knowledge, the
artificial system does not come to a true comprehension of the text, lacking the
necessary semantic and pragmatic skills. This is why the system cannot deal with
ambiguous or misspelled text, nor give different emotional colors to its voices according
to text semantics. The system tries to pronounce exactly what is written, applying the
standard orthographic conventions for interpreting characters, symbols, numbers, word
sentence delimiters and punctuation. The cues to a proper intonation are mainly
punctuation marks and syntactic relationships between words.
This means that the best synthesis results will be obtained with well-formed sentences,
correct and standard orthography, unambiguous contexts and rich and appropriate
punctuation. If you are able to prepare or select in advance the texts that will be fed into
the TTS system, then the main rule to follow is: Write texts according to the standard
orthographic and grammatical rules of the language
Loquendo suggests that you keep to the following simple guidelines:

Spell words carefully (using the correct character set for the language)
Use capital letters when grammatically appropriate and apply standard conventions for

representing numbers and abbreviations

Separate words according to the standard orthographic conventions (insert blanks between

words and after punctuation marks, when appropriate)

Avoid ambiguities
Write short sentences with correct syntactic structure
Insert punctuation marks frequently and carefully