Forum Discussion
SSML - change pronunciation of "conduct" so accent is on the second syllable.
Hi! I have a sentence where the AI voice is putting the emphasis on the 'con' instead of the 'duct' in the word conduct, e.g. "If you would like to conduct a survey." I'm assuming that I need to use the <phoneme> tag, but I am not familiar with how to use it. I was wondering if anyone has a good resource for shifting accents on words like this? (and particularly for the word "conduct.")
Ok, I tried again, asking Copilot a different way ("SSMl for the verb conduct shift accent to second syllable"), and got this code that works:
<speak>
<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="kən'dʌkt">conduct</phoneme>
</speak>Thanks for posting this! Your post helped me figure out a solution to a variation on your conduct pronunciation. In my case, I desired to use the verb form of "convert" vs the noun form. Here's how I solved it:
i.e.,
<speak>
<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="kənˈvərt">convert</phoneme>
</speak>If you desire the noun, do nothing.
Pity that there isn't a collection of words on the web requiring unique phoneme tags.
It looks like if you need to look up pronunciations (without relying on the whims of AI search), a good source would be Pronunciation on Cambridge Dictionary. You can copy and paste the text that uses the international phonetic alphabet (e.g. kən'dʌkt) and put it in here:
<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="pronunciation goes here">
Woops sorry, I replied to the wrong comment.
Can I ask which voice you are using? I am using the Storyline x64 version and I only have Neural voices and don't have any Standard voices in "English (US)" anymore. The Storyling 360 help page is confusing, since it has a handful of SSML tags. No closing tags. Plus it shows that some tags are compatible with Neural voices and they are not. For instance, when I input Will's first comment, everything shows up properly colored with the SSML tags, but I can't update/save it and get an error. Also the page links to the Amazon SSML page, which includes a ton of SSML tags that aren't supported either.
I asked Microsoft Copilot, and it gave me this (go AI!). However, I'm not sure the pitch attribute is really supported as I couldn't get it to be accepted no matter what I tried:
<speak> con<prosody rate="medium" pitch="+2st">DUCT</prosody> </speak>Thanks for sharing this info, Will.
Can I ask which voice you are using? I am using the Storyline x64 version and I only have Neural voices and don't have any Standard voices in "English (US)" anymore. The Storyling 360 help page is confusing, since it has a handful of SSML tags. No closing tags. Plus it shows that some tags are compatible with Neural voices and they are not. For instance, when I input Will's first comment, everything shows up properly colored with the SSML tags, but I can't update/save it and get an error. Also the page links to the Amazon SSML page, which includes a ton of SSML tags that aren't supported either.
Hi Steven,
Yeah, I noticed that as well, that only Neural voices are under the US heading now. There is one English speaker from Wales that is still "standard." I also encountered that the prosody tags don't work with Neural voices. I put together a demo of what I was able to get to work here:
