Adding more computer voices to Text-to-Speech

I would consider adding the functionality to import other voices instead. There are so many companies working on audio processing, it's not worth locking them out of your system and waste your resources on creating voices customers can buy from a 3rd party vendor.
I mean it as sincere recommendation.
Rgds,

Simone

Get Outlook for Android

Thanks so much for your recommendation and chiming back in with some additional details and use-case.

I've shared your thoughts as a feature request with our team on your behalf.

I’m curious to know what voices you have found, Simondavide. 

Dear Anthony,

I don't mean to be mistrustful, but your question does not sound much like a real question, but I feel like you're challenging my statement.
If my feeling is wrong, I will be happy to share with you some details of my implementation plan; but if I'm right, I hope you'll understand if I don't reply to your inquiry.

Simone

Get Outlook for Android

Hi, Simone! I sincerely was interested in finding out the voices that you had found that were more human like. While I do find the voices included with Storyline better than some I’ve found, I have searched for others without much success. The Google Wavenet Voices are pretty good, but there is not an easy way to integrate the API with Storyline. My question was motivated by wanting to find out a potential source for better voices.

Hi Anthony,

I see, so please accept my apologies for getting your question wrong.
On my side, the feedback I have about the A360 embedded voices is not very enthusiastic; I admit there are a couple of good voices (I'm still using the free trial, maybe the full version has more), but still the audience's feedback says they sound artificial.
So I'm working on 2 possible solutions: 1) find some more natural computer voices and 2) creating a computer voice out of one of our trainers' real voice (some companies claim they can do it);
but either solution is pointless if I cannot import the new voices in A360; that's the reason for my question to this forum.
Cheers,

Simone

HI Anthony, I'm a newcomer here. I do like the Google Wavenet (Australian) voices and would love to use a couple of them within Storyline 360. Did you ever get the integration API with Storyline working? 

Hi,

I am also looking at options to add other third party voices into Articulate Storyline 360. I could see that this thread was started 2 years ago and a feature request was placed to add external voices to SL360. Is that feature available now?

Thanks for your help.

Regards,

PS

Hi PS,

This feature has not been added to the built-in functionality of the software at this time.

Here is the feature for text-to-speech that is included with Storyline 360:

Converting Text to Speech

You are welcome to share your thoughts and use-case with our team directly here.

I wanted to share some information about how we manage these feature requests as that may be helpful.

As my team are heavy users of Storyline - we would really appreciate having more voice choices as well as more human sounding choices presented. If that isn't possible, the ability to import other voices from other sources is most welcome. Given the digital age, the text to speech functionality is one of the largest selling points for my team. Thank you for your consideration.

Hello Jenn,

I appreciate you sharing what you'd like to see with text-to-speech! We're monitoring requests around this feature, so I will make sure that your thoughts are seen.

Thanks for taking the time to contribute!

Has there been any movement to adding more realistic sounding text to speech voices?   That seems to be the common complaint from my course reviewers, is that the voices are too robotic or not natural sounding.

Hello Paul,

I appreciate you sharing the thoughts of your reviewers!

We're currently monitoring requests for additional editing options with the text-to-speech feature, including humanizing the voices, and I've added your comments to the report. Here's a look into our process:

• How We Manage Feature Requests

You're in the right place to hear any new news now that you're subscribed to this thread!

Yeah, this is a hard thing to create in a full elearning tool. Most of the high quality, natural voices are standalone options, as that is their focus. We use Amazon Polly (neural setting) for our TTS. I haven't used TextAloud in a while, but remember those being very high quality voices for the price. And while TTS in SL360 is a great feature, it's not one I rely on. 

Dear A360 support team,

Too much talking and no progresses.
Like many requests, this about enhancing the text-to-speech features (more voices, better quality, possibility to vary the speech speed,...) is being a lot discussed and analyzed, but no improvements so far. I've posted my first comment about better voices 2 years ago and this is still being discussed.
What your users need is known as "a little less conversation, a little more action"

S.Tritto

Hi All,

I posted a very long discussion about alternative text-to-speech solutions with link to a TTS app. You can read the discussion at https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/alternative-text-to-speech-tts-solutions-for-elearning. 

Dan

Hi Dan,

Many thanks for your detailed description of  TTS apps and for the three .mp3 examples.

Please could you describe what is involved in playing external .mp3 files direct from a Storyline module, via one of the TSS apps you describe?

Regards, Tim

I'm interested in this as well. Importing TTS voices would be huge.

My boss is willing to pay $5/month to get a more natural sounding voiceover for our courses. He is also aware that I have to download/import the audio files and manually create the subtitles-- and it is still more important that the voice doesn't sound robotic.

I think this is going to be an ongoing problem as we all learn online post-pandemic. 

I agree. We need more natural sounding voices.  Natural sounding voices is determining factor for me. I may need to create projects outside of Storyline if this is not resolved. 

Stacey I actually discovered that using the voice generator feature with articulate, even if the voices were more natural, it’s not worth it. Because for pronunciations you have to change the way words are spelled, but that also changes the closed captioning. It is A huge hassle to adjust those back-and-forth. It’s easier just to use a third-party tool for the voiceover and the automated captions in articulate. I use speechelo, it’s a one time fee of $29, and the main voice Joey is very natural!

I tried other authoring tools and a few have decent voices, I'm not sure how, till now, Articulate doesn't support better voices. Right now the feature is useless in my opinion.

Hello, Everyone!  

I'm happy to share that we have released a new update for Storyline 360 (v3.80.30988.0.).

In this update, we included an enhancement for:

• Support for NTTS or Neural Voices

Please update to the latest version of Storyline 360 to see this improvement. Here's how:

Update Authoring Apps

If you have any questions, please let us know in this thread or privately in a support case.

Have a great day! 

Woohoo! Huge time saver! Will finish a course today that would have taken until Friday with my third-party voices! Thank you, Joey!

Now just make it so all slide notes can be converted to speech at once :) (Already a feature request)

While this is a good step forward I am not convinced I can use it yet.

There are no options to customise pace, intonation, inflection, or build up a custom dictionary for business or industry unique/specific words.

Using those customisations in Azure Neural Voices generates an even better "real life" audio at the moment.