Forum Discussion
New Neural Text to Speech Voices from Amazon Polly
Storyline 360 uses standard voices from Amazon Polly for it's text to speech functionality. I imagine they use their API for this. This has been great for prototyping sides and getting the timing ri...
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 enhanced feature 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.
To take advantage of this update, launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer, and click the Update button next to Storyline 360. You'll find our step-by-step instructions here!
I've recently secured a subscription to Microsoft Azure's text to speech service. After testing a variety of text-to-speech tools with Australian accents, this is the one we settled on. It has a huge variety of languages and accents, in masculine and feminine voices, and the pronunciation is impeccable. Even better than Google and Amazon's neural voices. I tested its pronunciation of some lengthy medications (currently working on some health-related eLearning videos) and a pharmacist on our team confirmed the TTS got it right, the first time. I've been using it pretty heavily for the last month, and it's only costing us a dollar so far!
You can use IPA and SSML to correct pronunciation, and can even upload a custom lexicon if there's particular words used throughout your transcripts that require correction. E.g. names of local towns, and in our case, Aboriginal nations. Emphasis can kind of be created by using the web-based TTS tool to increase the volume and speed/rate that particular words are spoken. However, for some reason volume changes can only be applied to entire sentences. Here is a screenshot of how I've used the TTS tool to create emphasis on the words "will not". I have then done some basic audio trimming and stitched the sentence together in Storyline.
Our eLearning participants really hate listening to American or British narrators, and they hate the fake, robotic sounding Australian Amazon Polly voice that's built into Storyline. Some have said they would rather mute the entire video and read the captions instead. Us non-American eLearning developers really need an integrated, high quality neural voice within Storyline. But until Articulate make this a priority, the Microsoft Azure voices are a great alternative
