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GawieBing's avatar
GawieBing
Community Member
7 years ago
Solved

Text-to-Speech is awesome but has one serious flow.

I am very impressed with the Text-to-Speech engine now included in Storyline 360.  I previously had to use a voice-over artist and this was costly and frustrating when you wanted to make minor changes to the dialogue.  

 

Recording and modifying dialogue is a breeze with Text-to-Speech - except for one major flaw!  It is not possible to include any "control" variables in your Text-to-Speech dialogue.  By this I mean something like [Pause 5] or [emphasis].  I have read the discussions around getting the best out of Text-to-Speech and can manipulate "emphasis" to a certain degree using comma, etc.

 

The big frustration comes with inserting pauses.  For this, I need to edit the Text-to-Speech sound track and insert the pauses using the Silence function.  This is fine until you need to make any modification to the Text-to-Speech (such as adding a comma to improve emphasis), in which case all the silences I have inserted are deleted and I have to start over again.  

 

As much as Text-to-Speech is saving me time and money, it is also wasting a huge amount of time with the rework of the Silences.  It would be great if Articulate include the use of control variables i.e. [Pause 5] and [Emphasis] in the Text-to-Speech engine.  I could include these variables directly into the Text-to-Speech dialogue.

  • Hi, everyone!

    I have some great news to share. We just released another update for Storyline 360. In Update 83, we’ve included important fixes and new features!

    One enhanced feature we’ve included:

    Unlock new possibilities for text-to-speech audio. Use speech synthesis markup language (SSML) to adjust the speaking rate, modify pronunciation, emphasize words, add pauses, and more.

    To take advantage of this update, launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer, and click the Update button next to Storyline 360. You'll find our step-by-step instructions here!