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

Hello Alyssa, I just wanted to echo the same issue that Amos is having. I am finding that the text to speech feature (while awesome) will not only cut off the first word of a sentence but the entire first phrase. For example:

Original Text: 5) If the laboratory’s submission for the repeat deficiency is different from the POC or AOC 

Closed Captioning will capture:  .....deficiency is different from the POC or AOC 

The entire first phrase will be spoken but missed in closed captioning:  5) If the laboratory’s submission for the repeat 

I tried copying and pasting from a MS Word document, using the Copy feature integrated into Text-To-Speech, and manually copying the text. It is happening with another developer within my company as well. This feature is crucial for us since 508 compliance is mandatory. The lessons we are developing are 100+ slides each (1,600 slide course). Having to validate each work in the closed captioning is extremely time consuming.  Any support you can offer is greatly appreciated.

Hi Amos!

Thanks for sending over your file. I had a look, and I was able to hear the entire audio clip on each slide. Here's a screen recording of my testing. 

You can also test the published output by clicking here. Let me know if you hear the audio cut off while testing that link. If so, be sure to indicate what browser you were using while testing.

I'll be standing by!

Several months later and I am still having problems with the first word of text to speech being cut off. My customers have also complained about this and I find it hard to reproduce. It only happens sometimes. When you replay, it usually doesn't happen again.

I am attaching a short.story file with a few blank slides which have text to speech insterted.

Please preview the entire course and listen to the first word in the first slide. The word is "To" and it only gets cut off when you play the first slide.

Any ideas how to avoid this issue?

Hi Maria,

Thanks for including the WAV file. I do hear a pause between the two sentences. For a longer pause, you could add silence using the audio editor. 

Let me know if you have other questions!

Here is an example of what I mentioned on my previous message.

On this recording I have two sentences:

"Once site access is ready, your account will be set up with your email address as your user name."

"You will receive an email with a link to log in and set your own, secure password."

To me it doesn't almost sound as two sentences. Let me know what you think.

Maria

Thank you all for the suggestions. I have been using text to speech a lot and many times I have to write the words differently to have a good pronunciation. The other issue I find is that in many cases when I write a sentence and put a period, seems like the voice does not recognize the end of the sentence.

As for use the phonetics to write, it really doesn't work really well. Any other suggestions?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Tom.

I've submitted a feature request on your behalf.

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.

Hi Amos,

I really like your idea of using a specific "code" to insert silence before or between words, and that would make an excellent feature request! I'll pass the idea along to our product team for you.

For now, use punctuation, such as commas and semicolons, when you want to insert brief pauses between words. If you need a pause before the first word, convert your text to speech, then open the clip in the built-in audio editor and insert silence where it's needed. 

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.