I've been using text to speech for some presentations, fairly big ones. In going through it, I've noticed them (the Joanna voice, specifically) saying "dot". I came to realize that 'she' was pronouncing the period. I have not been able to determine a rhyme or reason for why this happens sometimes, but sometimes doesn't. I've also come across the voice pronouncing other punctuation marks (comma, semi-colon, dash). Is there a reason that I'm missing, maybe I'm doing something to make this happen? It's literally happening in one sentence, then not in the next, I can't figure out why.

This is an example...the third sentence pronounces the period as 'dot', but not the rest.

Hi James! It could be the formatting of the text! Did you copy and paste certain text in the Text to Speech text box? Also, would you mind sharing the .story file so we can take a look? You can do so by using the "Add Attachment" button in this discussion.

I overwrote it to fix it, but I am sure that I have draft versions with the issue still there. I will dig them up after the weekend, I somehow missed your reply, which I greatly appreciate!

To whom it may concern: text-to-speech inconsistently pronounces the word "dot" when using the male voice (Mathew). The text formatting is consistent with no extra spaces or special characters. It only happens at the end of the narration and even happens occasionally after the period at the end of the voice over speech has been removed entirely. I unfortunately cannot provide an example (proprietary content) , but it is taking place in several instances across multiple courses in this way. Each one has to be checked individually after published each time to be certain it is not taking place. Please have developers look into the code logic and provide a practical suggestion as a work around once pin-pointed. Longer paragraphs can sometimes produce the word "dot" with a pause prior. If I retain the final period back or even remove the final period, it speaks the word "dot" in both cases. When I reduce text from 1,465 characters (with spaces) to 789 characters (with spaces), the same remaining text will not produce the pronounced "dot" audio at the end (with or without a period at the end); so I am inclined to guess it something conditional relating to lengthy text-to-speech content with this particular case and character voice.It sounds minor, but quickly becomes quite troublesome when producing multiple courses for clients. With these instances, I would work around this by breaking the audio into shorter audio segments and patch them together using the timeline in Storyline; since I am actually exporting to Articulate Studio, which will not easily allow dual audio sources per slide, I will need to manually edit each audio to remove per instance. Thank you in advance for looking into it further.

Hi Andrew! You hit the nail on the head! We've narrowed this issue down to the character length as we noticed if the text exceeds 1000 characters than the word "dot" is read. We do have an active report for this bug, so I'm going to add your comments as we continue investigating. The current workaround is to include a carriage return in strings of text which exceed a character count of 1000. I'll report back to this discussion when I have an update.

Text to Speech pronounces punctuation?

13 Replies

LeslieMcKerchie
Staff
5 years ago
Hi Jessica,

Thank you for reaching out and sharing that you are experiencing a similar issue.

The issue discussed here is still open with our team, so I do not have an update to provide, but it sounds like you are experiencing a different issue.

With your permission, I'd like you to share your project file with our support engineers to investigate what's happening. You can share it privately by uploading it here. It will be deleted when troubleshooting is complete.
StevenLewerenz
Community Member
4 years ago
Good morning, all. I had the same issue with Matthew pronouncing the period at the end of a paragraph as "dot"....even if I remove the period! So I broke up the paragraph, which was over 1,000 characters. It now pronounces the entire body of text perfectly. I will definitely remember this little quirk. I have run across it before, and it drove me crazy!
JoseTansengco
Staff
3 years ago
Hello Everyone!

I have some great news to share. We just released another update for Storyline 360. In Update 74, we’ve included important fixes and new features.

One of the bugs that was fixed was an issue where "the Text-to-Speech feature was adding audible 'dot' to generated audio if single line of text exceeds 1000ish characters".

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.

Please let me know if you need additional help!

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Text to Speech pronounces punctuation?

13 Replies

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