Forum Discussion
Changing Speed of Audio in Articulate Storyline?
I'm working on creating some Articulate Storyline projects for a class I teach. Our current videos are MUCH less engaging and interactive and are simply the professor in front of a web camera lecturing. One things students LOVE to do is to speed up the audio / presentation of the video. Most students can listen and absorb items much faster than we can talk about them. I have some audio/lecturing slides in Storyline (e.g. when I do a voice-over of a screen capture or talk about the basics of financial statements). I'm wondering if there is anything I can add to the player that would allow students to control the speed of the audio.
Hi, everyone!
I have some great news to share. We just released another update for Storyline 360. In Update 83, we've included important fixes and new features!
One of the new features we've included:
- Unlock new possibilities for text-to-speech audio. Use speech synthesis markup language (SSML) to adjust the speaking rate, modify pronunciation, emphasize words, add pauses, and more.
Launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer to take advantage of this update, and click the Update button next to Storyline 360. You'll find our step-by-step instructions here.
Please let me know if you need additional help!
This issue continues to increase in importance. The learner's ability to increase playback / progress speed in the player is an option we need to see added to Storyline in the near future. Editing the video before publishing (i.e., forcing the user into a specific playback speed) is not sufficient.
Many learners today want to be able to control that audio speed. This is a central issue to the concept of "self-paced" learning -- it's not a trivial matter.
Hi there, Ian. Thanks for your thoughts. Can you share your perspective in a feature request? If you do, tell us a little more about specific use case where learners need to speed up or slow down audio. Is it narration that learners need to speed up? Is the seekbar on the player not a good solution for scrubbing through the timeline?
Thanks again for taking the time to share!
The seekbar is a good way to FIND a specific piece of audio. Its not good if you want to speed up the overall audio itself. To use an analogy - I look at using the seekbar like skipping a track on a CD. But I can't play the music track itself at 2x speed (so everyone sounds like Chipmunks, lol).
We would also love to see this request accommodated. Speeding up/slowing down both video and audio content is a feature users are increasingly familiar with and asking for--giving the user more control over their experience of going through a course.
So is it in the pipeline?
Scott, yeah, it's a photo of Pete Buttigieg from seven years ago. When this thread started.
Just submitted a feature request on this as well. Or is there an open request that we can just vote on (like how Canvas does it)? I work for Med School and med students go through most of our topics at 1.5x or 2x.
Yes, I am also working with medical students, and their largest complaint is that they cannot speed up audio so they can go at their pace. As others have said, this is not the ability to find a particular place with the seek bar, but a feature similar to an audio book, where you can listen at 1x or 2x or .75x.
Is there a way we can "up vote" for any of these feature requests? This is a feature most other tools seem to offer and we too may need to move to them due to client demand.
I'm watching this thread, as it's something crucial for us.
I must say, it's really frustrating to have the response of "no updates", "no timelines", etc. It would be far better for us customers to know it literally isn't even on the agenda (it has been 5 years!).
Can you at least confirm that it isn't in development yet (which I presume it isn't)? And if/when it is planned to even be considered? At least then we can give appropriate answers to our customers about this and/or consider whether to renew with Articulate.
Yes, everyone reading this, please make a feature request for variable speed of the timeline (and all of the audio, animations, video on it)! Thanks @Georg for the nudge.
This feature will allow learners to skim content that is more well-known and slow down content that is more complex. Also, humans can easily comprehend speech that is much faster than normal spoken rates:
"Most research has indicated no loss of comprehension or intelligibility at playback speeds of two or even three times normal speed. Cameron Earle, who is helping to commercialize variable-speed playback applications developed by Brigham Young University, said that most students chose rates that were 80 to 120 percent faster than normal with no decrease in test scores." (from the New York Times in 2003, bold added for emphasis; link: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/02/technology/now-hear-this-quickly.html)
As someone else said in this thread, this has also become an expected playback feature in the most common players, namely YouTube and Vimeo. Adding this feature will keep Storyline modern and help users engage better with learning.It only took 9 years. First post in this thread was 11/20/2013. Neat.
I also submitted a request for this feature.
Thanks, Archie! I see that we received it yesterday.
Agreed that users expect and often use this kind of functionality today. Youtube, for example, has a range of playback speeds from 0.25 X to normal to X2.
Hi,
Just adding another request to add this feature. I launched a course six months ago and there's been consistent feedback from the users asking for the ability to speed up the audio.
