Third-party TTS voice appears in Speech Agent list, but Sam ends up reading

[joebor1776]

I'm trying to use a trial version of Ivona voices to generate text-to-speech in CP5, to test the capability. The Ivona speech agents show up in the Captivate voices list, but when you generate the text-to-speech, Microsoft Sam ends up being the voice. Is there an extra step I'm missing? I was able to get this to work with the trial version of Cepstral voices, but I'm having a problem with both Ivona and Loquendo voices. Has anyone gotten this to work, and if so, what are the missing steps?

I should mention that the Loquendo and Neospeech voices that are included with Captivate work just fine. Also, this is a purchased version of Captivate 5.

Thanks!

[Guest]

Hi there,

Can you attach the snapshot of the speech management dialog of the slide where you are seeing this issue.

Steps to invoke speech management dialog

1. Launch the Slide notes panel ( Window >> Slide notes)

2. Click on the "Text to Speech" button to invoke the Speech management dialog for the slide

Thanks

Ashwin Bharghav B

[joebor1776]

Here it is:

[Guest · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

Thanks for the snap. I wanted to see the dialog to check if the Speaker is set as Ivona. It is indeed set as i can see it from the dialog snapshot.

As you mention Windows default speaker ends up reading the text. Can you try the following.

1. Launch the Control panel for Windows 7

2. Locate the "Speech Recognition" icon and launch the Speech Properties dialog

3. Navigate to the "Text to Speech" tab in the dialog and select the Ivona voice (if its present in the drop down)

4. With some default text preview the voice.

Check out in 4th step if Ivona Voices reads the text or Sam reads out. Let me know

If here Ivona does not read then there might be some problem with the voice. If Ivona reads the text successfully then Launch Captivate in Admin mode and try the speech generation process again.

Let us know if it worked.

Thanks

Ashwin Bharghav B

[joebor1776]

I'm all set--thanks!  I am using Windows XP, so I went to the Control Panel>Speech Properties dialog and changed the Voice selection to the Ivona voice. Then I started Captivate 5 (not in Admin mode, but just normally), and now the Ivona voice is working. Thanks for your help!

[joebor1776]

Actually, after further testing, this is only partially resolved. The Ivona voice only works in Captivate if I choose it as the default TTS voice for the computer (in Control Panel). So, if I wanted to use two voices in a presentation, for example, I cannot do that because everything is output as the voice selected as the computer voice.  For example, if I select Ivona voice A as the computer voice, I can use that voice in Captivate. But if I select Ivona voice A on one slide and Loquendo Simon on the next slide, the audio for both slides comes out as Ivona voice A.  Any ideas why that happens?

Thanks!

[Guest]

Hi there,

Generation of speech inside Captivate is  not related to setting a particular speaker as default system speaker. Irrespective of the system default speaker the speech should be generated for the set speaker inside Captivate.

Here I suspect there might be some problem with the speaker (or the way it is installed) as i can see you saying that speakers shipped with captivate works fine. Can you try installing the Ivona speakers again and try the speech conversion process.

Regards

Ashwin Bharghav B

[JP Cornelissen]

I have just tried the trail version of IVONA voices with Adobe Captivate 6 (on Windows 7) and I have the issue as reported by joebor1776.

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.