Text to Speech Quality Help?

By the way, if anyone needs the documentation on Neospeech you can download it from my website using the following link.

https://www.paulwilsonlearning.com/vtml

This is something that I've got better at over the years, in large part due to the documentation that Neospeech provides. I've found the main thing is to simulate the breaths that a real person would take when speaking. Also, another trick I use is to write as people speak and not how we write. This can be challenging when working with a corporate client who is used to technical, formal and grammatically perfect writing. Humans don't talk that way. One final note is to never have the speech agent refer to themselves. For example, you would want to say "As an employee, it's your job to make safety a part of your day." instead of "As employees, we should always make safety part of our day."

As soon as you hear that computerized voice refer to itself or include itself within the group the illusion is stripped away and your audience is instantly reminded that they aren't listening to a real person.

The following video is a tutorial I did a few years ago which might help some of you out.

Adobe Captivate - Text to Speech Hints and Tips

My newer videos are better quality but not much has changed with how you use it. The Notes panel has changed but the functionality is much the same.

I share your interest in better-quality speech agents, and I am scouring this forum for answers... One thing I've learned to do in addition to using the vtml tags (not all of which seem to work, BTW), is to spell words phonetically in order to get the proper pronunciation. For example, Kate says the word "antibodies" strangely; so I spell it "antebaudies." I also make liberal use of  vtml "pause" tags and commas, to break up long, robotic-sounding sentences into more natural-sounding phrases.

Oh, and about "piano background audio track" you mentioned, I don't know but I suspect it's the aural equivalent of a watermark rather than something used to enhance the audio. I could be wrong...

I'm not sure about the piano loop, but you may also find some other voices (which I think sound terrific . . . especially the British ones) at http://www.text2speech.org/  Using this will be a bit more cumbersome in that you will need to type your text on that site, produce the mp3 file and then download it - to have to import it into Captivate - so give it a whirl and see if the difference in voice quality is worth it.

Personally, I only use TTS for scratch audio for initial client review - and then use a real human voice for the final product. This way I don't have to wait on changes from a V/O talent, and all of the audio sounds uniform.

I hope this is helpful.

CHUCK