Text to Speech

[rshindel]

I keep hearing wonderful presentation that proport to be created using text-to-speech as opposed to a live voice.  Mine all sound like a computer generated voice, which all my test groups hate.  What is the secret to creating text-to-speech that sound like a "real" person?  is it even posssible?  BTW, my preference would be to have a middle age female voice.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated

[Anjaneai_Srivastava]

Hello,

If you have problem with proper diction and pronounciation of certain words then a trick could be to spell the word the way you would like it to be pronounced . For Example -- "VOICE" can written as "VOYC" to improve pronounciation and also use DOT '.' for providing pauses appropriately. You would always have an option to record your voice and then you can decide the accent, emotions, prononciation and rate of speech. 

There are a total of 6 Voices (3 female) available for Text to Speech as part of Neo and Loquendo. If  you have not tested all, download the Captivate 5 voices from here --

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/908/cpsid_90804.html

For Captivate 5.5 --

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=captivate

Sign-in with your Credentials -- Click on the OS next to TTS and it would download Voices.

See if it helps?

Thanks,

Anjaneai

[rshindel]

Thank you Anjaneai,

Can I infer from your comments that the speech I hear with natural cadence and inflections are really recorded voices, and not created with the text-to-speech application?

<mailto:rshindel@carosh.com> rshindel@carosh.com

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[peppermint_pt]

HI Anjaneai,

I too am having difficulty with the speech that I hear. I downloaded the Neo- Text to speech add- on but when I go through the steps in my Captivate presentation to add text then generate audio, it sounds warbly and computerized and is difficult to understand.

Have I left a step out?

Thanks

peppermint_pt

[Anjaneai_Srivastava]

Hello peppermint_pt ,

Download the Loquendo TTS and try to observe if the voices sound natural to you.

@rshindel - Yes, the voices have just been incorporated and are meant to be compatible with Adobe Captivate. Neo Speech and Loquendo are the providers of that.

I would recommend you both to visit - http://www.neospeech.com/

http://www.loquendo.com/

and if you find any suitable voices you can contact the manufacturer for the licenses.

Thanks,

Anjaneai

[joebor1776]

Try out IVONA voices--we use the Brian and Kendra voices in our Captivate videos and they sound great.

[pcapademic]

When I tried to use the Ivona voices with Captivate 5.0, I had trouble with the Ivona mark up passing from Captivate to the speech synthesis engine. Is this working in 5.5?

[joebor1776]

It's working fine for us in Captivate 5.0. Are you referring to SSML tagging not getting picked up? IVONA support is pretty responsive, you might try emailing them. If I remember right, we had to use single quotes instead of normal double-quotes in SSML tags (or maybe vice-versa), when entering SSML in the slide note in Captivate.

[pcapademic]

Which Ivona product did you purchase? And, are you using windows 7?

[joebor1776]

IVONA Studio, Brian (British English Male) and Kendra (American English Female). We have authors using these with both Windows XP and Windows 7 (Captivate 5.0).

[joebor1776]

I forgot to mention--for Captivate to recognize IVONA voices, you have to first select the IVONA voice as the Windows speech narrator (for example, in Windows XP, Control Panel>Speech Management). That might be your issue?

[JP Cornelissen]

I have just tried the trail version of IVONA voices with Adobe Captivate 6. Adobe Captivate sees the installed IVONA voices and it allows me to assign a different voice to each sentence. Unfortunately the audio generation fails to use the assigned voices, it uses the voice that is set as the Windows default voice (Windows 7 » Control Panel » Speech Recognition » Test To speech). This means  you can't create a dialog between two or more persons. Does anybody have a solution for that?

Thanks

John-Pierre

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Edit: I have sent an email to Ivona to see if they have a solution, but did not receive a reply yet. In the meantime I did some more research and found that http://www.cereproc.com voices are compatible with Captivate 6.