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

As humans we don't always follow phonetics in our speech patterns as rigidly as these character voices do so you end up with word pronunciations that sound odd and more robotic. If you could add the ability to mark vowels to be long or short in the text to speech edit box that would help some. Sometimes you want the short "a" instead of the long "a" or vice-versa. 

Then the other thing humans do is vocal inflection. We don't hit every single word in a sentence exactly the same emphasis, or in the case of these character voices, with no emphasis on any word. That's what makes them sound robotic. Perhaps in the text to speech edit box you could add the ability to highlight a word and make it bold and then then the character would emphasis that word a little bit more. And, for words that have more than one syllable, you could highlight and bold just the syllable that you want emphasized. That would really help make these voices sound more natural.