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!
168 Replies
Thanks for continuing to add your thoughts, folks!
I'm going to share the additional insight with our product team. As Alyssa mentioned, it really helps us understand the need. If this feature gets added to a future update, this discussion will be the first to know!
Not sure if my comment here would come across as "beating a dead horse". Just wanted to add that we just finished our course for 4th year med students and this was our1st time using Articulate SL for all of our interactive topics. The request to change player speed came up more than 20 times in student evals. We're gonna have to address this somehow. It would be nice to know if this feature will be available soon, before I invest time in designing/implementing some type of work-around. Thank you!
Hi there Team, this is also something that I am searching an answer for. The voice I chose for my "Text to Speech" option, is the best suited for what we want, however the speed is just a little too fast. There must be a way where we can make it a bit slower, as one of the other readers stated, not everybody hears at the same speed as others. This is definitely something we will be grateful for if there is a solution. Regards
Hi everyone,
The feedback you've shared here is valuable, and I can understand your need for this kind of feature. We take all of this into consideration as we prioritize and plan for future enhancements. A feature that would allow learners to speed up or slow down content playback is not on our immediate roadmap; however, if we add this feature in a future update of Storyline 360, we promise to keep you updated.
Hello Yuyen and Concetta,
So, to begin with, some of our IDs found a workaround for the playback speed, but it's clunky. If you open the video up in another window and right click on it, the browser offers tools to adjust speed. This is crazy making for us and our students, as there is good research on cognition and playback speed, which I posted earlier. We like to say that we not only practice evidence-based medicine, but also evidence-based pedagogy!
Our Ed Tech team is researching how to make Articulate modules searchable in OneNote, and I think they found one, but I don't know the details yet. I will post when I learn more about this-- Meanwhile, we are posting modules in two formats, too. One in Word to take notes on, and the actual module. However, the Word module, produced from Storyline360, is really pictures of text that can't be grabbed to make flashcards. I would love to be able to turn on a feature to allow students to make flashcards.
Medical school curriculum is dense and efficiency rules the day. Educational materials must be "high yield." If they aren't, there are lots of ancillary business cropping up (Boards and Beyond, Sketchy Micro, etc.,) usurping our content and delivering it in a way that students can access easily and import into to Quizlet or Anki.
I don't have a good understanding of Articulate 360 as a company. It appears that many software engineers work remotely. There is a friendly, robust, and responsive sales dept.
Cara
It seems like a bunch of us have submitted feature requests for this, so there must be a bog down in the feature request system where they can't consolidate/prioritize things that have multiple requests like this.
I know one of our most popular additions to our module design has been allowing video playback speed alteration from our Vimeo videos, and people keep asking about when the ability is going to come for Storyline audio (both in imported audio and in Speech-to-Text).
I've been patiently holding my breathe on this one, thinking surely, surely, they'll at least grace us with an answer - even if it's just to say it isn't being considered (which quite clearly seems the case).
Fair to say, I've died of asphyxiation.
Getting lots of complaints from medical students about Articulate. They can't speed up playback speed or grab text to make flash cards. Our students import everything into OneNote, as a repository for studying for big stakes exams (Step 1). I'm a little concerned that there are staff responding "if we make changes in this area, we'll let you know" after five years of complaints. I recently lobbied to get Articulate for our instructional designers because I believe in adaptive learning, the benefit of spaced repetition, and the testing effect. After a robust conversation with the sales department, it seems like it's crickets now. Vimeo, MedEd, Osmosis, and YouTube has a variable playback speed option. Can you offer more details about the logic for not adding this feature? The process of collecting feedback, analyzing it, and making choices about updates?
I'll echo Yuyen - we also provide a word file of the slides in the resources tab for our people to be able to use for notetaking, but we've gotten lots of requests for OneNote. If there's an easy way I can provide that to them I know my learners would love it!
I second Cara's request to have more details on the exact status/decision. This is our first year using Articulate and we rolled out 22 Storyline topics (out of 70+ total in our course). In general our students have responded positively, but right off the bat, this was one of the requests/complaints we received. After our course finishes at the end of March, we'll be put on the spot to give a more specific answer (vs. the vague "I've already put in a feature request" that I gave at the time). So more information will be greatly appreciated.
On a side note (to Cara), could you share more of your or your students' experience with importing SL slides into OneNote? The workaround we provided was to publish the module in 2 formats, and post the Word file in Canvas for them as well. If there are better practices anyone is using, I would love to learn more!
Thanks for you insight, Mary and Christiana! If we make changes in this area, we'll be sure to keep this discussion updated.
