Forum Discussion
Word Emphasis in Text to Speech
Is there a way to emphasize a particular word in the Text to Speech function?
For example, "This may not seem like a problem..."
In that example, is there a way to emphasize the word, "seem" in ...
Hi Sheri, what are you using as your nice-sounding alternative, please? Our Creative Editor is currently swamped with projects so I'm looking to see how I can do with Articulate for now!
I've recently secured a subscription to Microsoft Azure's text to speech tool. After testing a variety of text-to-speech tools with Australian accents, this is the one we settled on. It has a huge variety of languages and accents, in masculine and feminine voices, and the pronunciation is impeccable. Even better than Google and Amazon's neural voices. I tested its pronunciation 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. And the pricing... well let's just say I've been using it pretty heavily for the last month, and it's only costing us $1 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 Polly 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.
Hi Brooke, Sheri and Tina,
I just wanted to share some news about Storyline 360 Update 80. This update might be interesting for you since you’ve explored other options to improve the quality of TTS. In update 80, we have taken advantage of Amazon Polly’s neural text to speech feature. You will see better versions of most of the voices when inserting TTS audio. These will show up in the same place as the standard voices, under “Neural Voices”. These are voices that sound more natural and human-like and are considerably higher in quality compared to the older standard TTS voices.
A list of these voices can be found here. Updating Storyline 360 to the latest version is super easy, here is the guide in case anyone needs it.
We will continue to keep tabs on requests to support ways to control emphasis, speaking rate, inserting silence, pronunciation and SSML support in general. Please let me know of any feedback (good or bad), around this enhancement and we’ll be happy to pass it along to our dedicated team of engineers.
All the best,
Michael Marcos
Customer Support Product LiaisonThank you Michael. Appreciate your efforts to integrate at least one neural TTS product in Storyline. I have tested the one Australian voice now available in Storyline, and while it is significantly better than the robotic sounding standard voices, it doesn't quite meet our business needs. Azure TTS voices are much more natural and allow pronunciation to be corrected using the IPA, not just SSML. Here is a demo video I created, showing the use case for our particular business needs. I will of course recommend the built-in neural voice for users within our business that have very short production timelines, but for everyone else, I expect they will prefer the Azure voices.
