Some options for controlling pauses in Text-To-Speech (TTS)

There was an article posted a while back that talked about how to add pauses in Storyline's text-to-speech. It mentioned adding punctuation, but it missed the option to add line breaks, and didn't cover the difference in pauses caused by different characters. 

What I found was that commas add the shortest pause. Periods are a little longer. Line breaks are almost double the pause of a comma. In case you're  wondering, you can't add pause characters together to lengthen the pauses but I'd like to add that as a feature request.

Here's a test you can run to try it for yourself:

Cut the text below between the ----- markers and paste it into the TTS editor. Play the audio by previewing the slide. You will definitely hear the difference.

Do not edit the text unless your cut-and-paste removes the line breaks. Make sure there are two line breaks per number in the final test. Technically looking like this:

 

One<line-break>
<line break>
Two<line-break>
<line-break>
Three<line-break>
<line-break>
Four<line-break>
<line-break>
Five<line-break>
<line-break>

 

-----

With no pause characters, I sound like this: one two three four five

With commas as pause characters, I sound like this: one, two, three, four, five,

With periods as pause characters, I sound like this: one. two. three. four. five.

With line breaks as pause characters, I sound like this:

one

 

two

 

three

 

four

 

five

-----

Hope this takes some of the mystery out of TTS. I've also included a .story file for convenience, if that helps.