MarilynMcNeil-d
3 years agoCommunity Member
Text-to-Speech
Hi, Are there any plans to upgrade the Articulate Storyline text-to-speech functionality to use Amazon Polly neural? Would the licensing fee change to include this option for customers?
Please, please incorporate Microsoft Azure neural voices!
I've recently been testing Microsoft Azure's text to speech service, which has a huge variety of languages and accents, in masculine and feminine voices, and its pronunciation is impeccable. Even better than Google and Amazon's neural voices. I tested its pronunciation in Australian voices, of some lengthy medications (currently working on some health-related eLearning videos) and a pharmacist on our team confirmed the TTS got it right, the first time. I've been using it pretty heavily for the last month, and it's only costing us a dollar so far!
You can use IPA and SSML to correct pronunciation, and can even upload a custom lexicon if there's particular words used throughout your transcripts that require correction. E.g. names of local towns, and in our case, Aboriginal nations. Emphasis can kind of be created by using the web-based TTS tool to increase the volume and speed/rate that particular words are spoken. However, for some reason volume changes can only be applied to entire sentences. Here is a screenshot of how I've used the TTS tool to create emphasis on the words "will not". I have then done some basic audio trimming and stitched the sentence together in Storyline.
Our eLearning participants really hate listening to American or British narrators, and they hate the fake, robotic sounding Australian Amazon voice that's built into Storyline. Some have said they would rather mute the entire video and read the captions instead. Us non-American eLearning developers really need an integrated, high quality neural voice within Storyline. But until Articulate make this a priority, the Microsoft Azure voices are a great alternative.