Text to speech speed

Hi All, I would also want to slowdown the text to speech narration. I read all the threads here. Did we have a solution to it? Please can you post here the link?

Thanks!

it seems, storyline used for text-to-speech "Amazon Polly"

https://aws.amazon.com/polly

if this is true, here is the documentation for changing the speed (for the articulate developer)

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/voice-speed-vip.html

Two speed options are available to you when using SSML with Amazon Polly:

• Preset speeds: x-slow, slow, medium, fast, and x-fast. In these cases, the speed of each option is approximate, depending on your preferred voice. The medium option is the normal speed of the voice.

• n% of speech rate: any percentage of the speech rate, between 20% and 200% can be used. In these cases, you can choose exactly the speed you want. However, the actual speed of the voice is approximate, depending on the voice you've chosen. 100% is considered to be the normal speed of the voice.

Hi everyone, in reviewing this thread, I saw a handful of posts that called out the robotic nature of the Text To Speech feature in Storyline 360 and I wanted to share some good news. Today in Storyline 360 update 80, users will be able to use better versions of most of the voices when inserting TTS audio. These will show up in the same place as the standard voices, under “Neural Voices”. These are voices that sound more natural and human-like and are considerably higher in quality compared to the older standard TTS voices.

A list of these voices can be found  here. Updating Storyline 360 to the latest version is super easy, here is the guide in case anyone needs it. 

We will continue to keep tabs on requests to support ways to control speaking rate, inserting silence, pronunciation and SSML support in general. Please let us know of any feedback (good or bad), around this enhancement and we’ll be happy to pass it along to our dedicated team of engineers. 

All the best, 
Michael Marcos
Customer Support Product Liaison

This seems great, thanks for the update, Michael. I experimented with one of the neural voices (Salli - English USA), and compared it to a course I had published several months ago using the same voice, and it still sounds identical. Do you know which English USA voices have been updated? Thanks.

Alan, he posted links to the voices, look for the list that is Neural and you see what is updated. A list of these voices can be found  here. Updating Storyline 360 to the latest version is super easy, here is the guide in case anyone needs it. 

Yeah, I looked at the list, and all the English USA voices are listed under neural voices, none are listed under standard. But the Salli voice sounds exactly the same as it has for years, even though it is listed under the new category. 

Hi Alan, I've tested this a couple of times but they don't sound similar at all. 

The update 79 version (Standard TTS) of Salli sounds  like its coming off of a small pair of speakers and has a "tingy" attribute. In the sample below, the TTS version pronounces Neural like "Duval", the Update 80 version has more roundness in the tone, and the pronunciation and cadence is profoundly better. It pronounces neural like "nooral". 

Update 79 Standard TTS
https://360.articulate.com/review/content/fdd037d8-ad89-46bd-b00e-7fbc67863985/review

Update 80 Neural TTS
https://360.articulate.com/review/content/b918467b-10a9-4ffd-8271-cb3b089d7377/review

Can you share  a published review item with the Salli Voice on your end just like what I did here?

I just used the text description for neural voices as the script: 

Starting with the September 2023 update, you can generate realistic, natural-sounding text-to-speech narration with neural voices. This is the full list of neural voices in Storyline 360, alphabetized and arranged by language. This list is updated whenever new voices are added

Did you rerender the voices? You have to make an edit to the TTS text for it to pull the new voices, I don't think the TTS is automatically updated

I listened to both of your links, then created my own TTS audio for comparison, and I agree with you, the I cannot hear much of a difference to the Salli voice.  I had a different voice in a course that I upgraded (Amy, English UK) and the improvement was clearly noticeable. So maybe Salli didn't change much?   I also learned that i needed to change something or re-create the TTS file to get the upgraded voice.... simply clicking the update button with no edits didn't get me the new voice!

BTW, we started using MS Azure Speech Studio a few months ago.  It has better options for tweaking the pronunciation and speed, so we will continue using it despite these new voices (which are an improvement on many of them)

there is no automatic upgrade to neural voices for previous courses*

if there is an upgrade for your used voice, you will need to update every single audio manually

• mark the audio in the timeline
• choose tab options, then button "text-to-speech"
• change something, e.g. add a space at the end
• then click update
• a progress bar appears

* the audio will NOT be generated on publish (not even in the past)

Ahhh, I edited the speech-to-text slightly and republished, and YES, it does sound noticeably better!! Thanks for the help, all. This is a nice update!

It would be nice to have a function to update all of the TTS, I used it for a guide track in an old course and to update I had to remove a line break in every TTS on 75 slides not a nice job.

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Thank you Phil! Btw, it looks like your signature came in with your reply.

Glad Phil's suggestion worked out for you Alan. Appreciate the additional insight and requests! 

We're still waiting for the implementation of VTML. It does much more than moderate speed and pauses. For example, it can be used indicate the part of speech for a word that can be pronounced differently based on usage.

<vtml_partofsp part=”coordinates”>verb</vtml_partofsp>

Adding myself to the list of people who want to see VTML. It has many more uses in addition to moderating speed.

Following....

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!