TTS Tips or Tricks

ricortiz

I'm having issues with the way the TTS engine pronounces city names and letters.  For example, Los Angeles sounds like "Lowes Angilees".   It also doesnt sound out letters correctly if I seperate them and capitalize them.  For example, if I have "D M A" - I clearly hear "Dee"  "Ehmm", but A is not really sounded out - I only hear a very short sound.  Do you have any doucumentation or guidelines for TTS scripts? 

Thanks,

Ric

thuneke

Ric

I would recommend that you use MyPortal - Content - Manage TTS to build your TTS scripts. That will let you Preview them and it will verify the TTS first. The Supported TTS Tags is on the right hand side. Here are some tips.

These are all Say-As tags:

Cities - name tag.

Address - address tag

Letters - acronym tag - pass in as "DMA".

Numbers, individual - number:digits tag - if that is too fast do not use any tag and put a space in between the number "1 2 3 4 5". Additional spaces will slow it more.

Date - date:mdy - the second part can vary depending on the way you want the date played.

Telephone - telephone - takes standard phone number format.

URL - net:uri tag.

Setting emphasis level="strong" will also slow the playback a little and make it more crisp.

Remeber that the TTS engine is trying to interpret what you pass in. The reason the "A" sounds like ah is because the engine assumes it is in a sentence, even though it is capatilized.

prosody rate="medium" is the default. Lowering it makes the voice sound slurry, raising makes it squeaky mouse affect. Leave as default by not specifying.

Tom