Text to speech - How to fix the first word being cut off

Ashley,

Thanks a lot for your useful tips.

First of all I just want to say the the text to speech is an awesome feature which I am using extensively. However, this is an important thing that detracts it.

Sometimes, when I play a video with text to speech, the first syllable (or full word if it is very short such as "if" or "to") is not heard. Perhaps it's because the video can be a bit sluggish when it starts playing. Regardless, it is good practice to have slight (say 1 sec.) silence at the start of each clip so that the learner has a moment to "tune their brain" into the clip before it starts talking. At In some instances, it is also useful to insert moments of silence between words to emphasize a point or switch to a new concept that you introduce.

My question is...

Is there a trick to insert a silence before or between words?

I tried inserting different characters such as commas or periods but that it didn't help. Imagine how simple it would be. Each comma adds a second of silence For example:

Example 1
,,,,Welcome to this course. 

Example 2
Take a moment to look at this diagram,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, Have you noticed the bla, bla, bla?

A workaround is to Edit Audio and insert a silence. However, that's time consuming and lost once you edit the Text-to-Speech or regenerate it.