Forum Discussion
AI Voice Generation emphasis in SL
Sorry for the quick delay here—I took this back to the team to see if anyone had thoughts/suggestions similar to what you shared about that break time markup. It seems like there's consensus that emphasis in particular is hard to achieve, when I think about this it makes sense because it's not quite a pronunciation difference, I can see why the speech models would have trouble with it! The feeling on the team is there's some experimentation needed to get the voice to flow correctly, and that sometimes experimentation with pronunciation can achieve close to what you want for emphasis.
I think you've probably already seen this based on what you referenced, but for anyone else following this thread who may be curious, here is an article the team put together that talks about some of the limitations and options with SSML models and AI speech.
Curious to keep following this and see if there are any specific practices folks have landed on that worked really well to achieve emphasis.
Hello Paul,
I'm having a related issue with getting the AI voice generator to properly pronounce certain proper names and acronyms. For example, "ORPS" vs. O-R-P-S.
Thanks
David
Hi David,
I tend to use either phonetic spelling to make it pronounce certain words or use full stops/periods to force it to spell out initialisations. Sometimes adding speech marks around the word helps as well.
So to force it spell out ORPS I might try "O.R.P.S".
One that always causes issues is "read"... is it current tense or past tense? If I want it to use the current tense pronounciation I'd spell this "reed".
In my own field, it seems to have real problems with the phrase "on-us" (meaning a banking transaction with the bank's own customer, as opposed to another bank's customer). Whether or not it pronounces this as "us" or "U.S" seems to be random, and also affected by the voice you choose. I've sometimes even resorted to spelling it as "on bus" and then editing the output afterwards to cut out the "b" sound!
Alternatively, sometimes you just have to regenerate the speech over and over until it gets it right.
It's an exciting technology, but it's not 100% there yet and you have to put work in to tweak it to give you what you want.
These are all super creative solutions, Paul–thank you for sharing! I got a chuckle out of the "on bus" -> "on-us" workaround 🤣 🚌
Thanks Noele,
Is there any guidance from Articulate on the emphasis issue I started the discussion with? I found an article which says that<break time="1.5s" />
can be used to add a pause (which seems to work well), so I'm wondering if there are other similar xml-like tags which can be used for other purposes...
Sorry for the quick delay here—I took this back to the team to see if anyone had thoughts/suggestions similar to what you shared about that break time markup. It seems like there's consensus that emphasis in particular is hard to achieve, when I think about this it makes sense because it's not quite a pronunciation difference, I can see why the speech models would have trouble with it! The feeling on the team is there's some experimentation needed to get the voice to flow correctly, and that sometimes experimentation with pronunciation can achieve close to what you want for emphasis.
I think you've probably already seen this based on what you referenced, but for anyone else following this thread who may be curious, here is an article the team put together that talks about some of the limitations and options with SSML models and AI speech.
Curious to keep following this and see if there are any specific practices folks have landed on that worked really well to achieve emphasis.
Good advice. I was able to find a workaround to get "orps" instead of O-R-P-S using *orps but it does not work consistently. It seems to depend on the words before or after it. It sometimes just drops the final s completely.