Slow down text to speech voice

[Guest]

I am using text to speech on Captivate 4.  Essentially, I love the text-to-speech feature; however, sometimes the voice is just too fast.  I do not want to add pointless punctuation because I use the same text for the Closed Captioning.  Does anyone know how to slow down the voice (Paul) so people actually can follow what he is saying.

Thanks !!

[Guest]

This does not exactly answer your question, but I have experienced the same situation where the text to speech voice talks too fast. What I have done, with varying results, is open the audio in the edit mode and insert short periods of silence. This is, at best, tedious, but it has worked in some instances.

There must be a better way to do this?

[Guest]

That's exactly what I have been doing.  But as you said, it is very tedious moreso because if you make edits and redo the conversion, the silences you inserted are gone.  At least now I know that another Captivate user notices the fast speech.

[joebor1776]

Not sure if this will work, but you can try going into the Windows Control Panel>Speech. Select the

voice (whatever voice you're using in Captivate) as the "Voice selection" and then adjust the Voice speed, and click Apply.  I have been evaluating Ivona voices lately and have been able to adjust their speed globally using this method. I haven't tried it with the Neospeech voices though.

[Guest]

Do the neospeech voices, or the voices you have in Captivate, appear in the voice selection drop down for you?  I only see the Microsoft Anna - English (United States) voice.

Thank you

[joebor1776]

Sorry, I should have checked this out further before posting. The Neospeech voices that come with Captivate are not shown in the list--only the additional TTS voices (IVONA) that I have downloaded trial versions for are showing up in the Speech list.

[Guest]

No problem, thank you for the suggestion though.  It would have been great if that worked with Captivate.

[Benredux · Accepted solution]

Adobe implemented VTML in Captivate 4, which is a mark up language for Text to Speech.

It looks something like this (The color added for emphasis):

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet \pause, consectetur \speed=30 adipisicing elit \speed=50 \pause, sed do eiusmod tempor \speed=30 incididunt \pitch=20 ut

The \pause, creates a half second pause and and a \pause. creates a full second pause

The \speed= changes the speed for all the text that comes after the tag in that segment.  In this case I took it down to 30 and then brought it back up to 50 before the pause and then down again at the end.

Thte \pitch= changes the pitch of the speech.  I made it very deep at the end.

Here's a more in depth explanation of some of these tage, taken from the Adobe Captivate blog:

"

The following commands allow the quality of the output voice to be  controlled by modifying its rhythm, intonation, volume and timbre. The  output speech is modified from the word following the command, up until  the end of the prompt.

Speed Control: Allows the speaking rate to be modified, expressed in an abstract scale 0-100.

\speed=<num>

Example: 

\speed=60 (Scale 0-100)

\speed=60 This text is read at a faster speed.

Pitch Control: allows the fundamental frequency (tone or pitch) to be modified, expressed in an abstract scale 0-100

\pitch=<num>

Example:

\pitch=60 (Scale 0-100)

\pitch=60 This text is read at a 60Hz frequency rating.

Volume Control: allows the volume (loudness) to be modified, expressed in an abstract scale 0-100 or in decibels (dB).

\volume=<num>

Example:

\volume=60 (Scale 0-100)

\volume=60 This text will be read at a 60 decibel rating.

Timbre Control: allows the voice timbre to be modified by a shift in frequency, expressed in an abstract scale 0-100.

\timbre =<num>

Example:

\timbre=60 (Scale 0-100)

\timbre=60 This text is read at a timbre value of 60.

"

If you haven't installed the improved voice to text voices, get them off of the "Extras" folder on the Captivate install CD or download them here:

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

Look for the install links for windows and mac below the trial link.

/Benjamin

[Guest]

You're absolutely right.  I actually found the same answer moments before you responded to my post.  The information I found is at the following link:

http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2009/04/vtml_tags_in_text_to_speech_1.html

Thank you for your help!!!