You can also the context interpretation which helps when a word has two different pronunciations depending on context, example: coordinates as in a map location, and coordinates as in coordinating an event. You can tell the parser to speak particular words with more emphasis by using the emphasis command “]”. Maybe you want to really stress a particular word like “do NOT try this at home!”. To return to the normal parsing method add “]”. To tell the parser you want the number read literally insert “]” before the number. Let’s say you have the number “5551234” and want it read as “five five five one two three four” instead of “5 million five hundred fifty one thousand two hundred thirty four”. Sometimes you may want it to speak each digit of a number individually rather than speaking the numbers value. Apple has given control over speaking speed as well.
Some of the voices sound better than others. To add a 3.5 second pause between paragraphs in the preceding text, it would now look like this: Hello, this is a test of the Apple Text to Speech capability. To place a pause you add “]” where x is the number of milliseconds to pause. In this case you want to use the silence command.
The secret to pausing lies in the parsers ability to process embedded speech API commands inline with the text. If you insert “…” on a blank line it will speak “horizontal eclipses”.
Any amount of whitespace can be added between paragraphs but it is ignored by the parser. Apple has given control over speaking speed as well.īut there is still a problem with long pauses between paragraphs. The preceding paragraph can be re-written as follows and between sentence pauses are evident which makes it much easier to listen and follow: Hello, this is a test of the Apple Text to Speech capability. This can be mitigated to some extent by using “…” at the end of each sentence. Sentences are run together with nary a pause. Right away I found it wasn’t quite perfect.
Try it! Hello, this is a test of the Apple Text to Speech capability. Text to speech is available by selecting text you want spoken, right clicking and choosing “Speech” -> “Start Speaking”. There are many voices to choose from, and a handful of high quality voices that are very close to almost being indistinguishable from human speech (Siri quality). I’ve been playing with the text to speech capabilities built into Apple Mac OS X recently.
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