Microsoft text to speech tricks

We find that one to be way past creepy Is there any work going on to help the built in voices sound more natural? Until then, we are voice-recording everything ourselves. Good to know! I'll keep the TTS even shorter. Was this using the voices from the most recent Articulate update?

I would advise everyone who's creating serious courses to stop using TTS and instead buy a good condenser-microphone and use your own voice. I spent a lot of time with courses using both TTS and the instructors own voice, and it cannot be understated how much difference the voice from a real human being makes. The TTS becomes tedious to listen to really quickly, which in turn turns your whole course into a chore to go through even if you've spent a lot of time creating a fun and intuitive graphical interface.

Great points Tommy! I think it depends on the audience that you are designing content for. I would suggest using your own voice for adult learners as we tend to zone out quickly to the sound of a robotic voice. However, maybe text-to-speech is more suitable for younger audiences like K education.

What are your thoughts? I agree it could be more suitable for younger children, however from a pedagogical standpoint a real voice with some childish humor and happy tone-set would be way better. TTS just isn't good enough yet to be comfortable to listen to for human beings, especially not for hours.

I can understand using it for translation-purposes, but it should be avoided as much as possible. Allows to synchronize the slides, content, etc. Best development in Articulate ever! Hello David. Can you elaborate a little more as to what makes T2Speech so great? Great article and some tips I wasn't aware of. I will say that I agree with the other posters here, TTS should be avoided whenever possible, to me TTS speech screams 'unprofessional'.

While TTS has made great strides in attempting to sound more natural, it still has a long way to go. I use it for POC only and as placeholders to help with animation timings, etc. Then once the timeline is close I re-record in my voice. Many people have a fear of doing their own narration, and I can say my first few times I had similar issues. But like most things practice makes perfect, and will become second nature. A good microphone I use the Yeti Blu and a quiet environment are keys here.

Long term these voices will only get better and cheaper - I believe that in our segment TTS is not only the fiscally sensible move, it's the correct move overall - we have had more time to drive the visually engaging aspects of our courses and have a more efficient workflow when it comes to corrections with the inevitable policy changes that occur in our business. I for one am a huge fan of TTS and hope that Articulate continues to develop it towards with the end goal of giving us control over inflection and tone of a voice one day.

I feel Articulate's voices are good but they lag behind some paid services out there. They have complained about the robot voices, but we assured them that we will eventually replace the robots with our own recorded voices -- but only after we taken their feedback on the wording in the script and made those changes quickly and easily in the TTS. Since the digital voices can be difficult to understand sometimes, I've found it helps to show closed captions to clarify what the voice is trying to say.

Next week we're going to start recording real human audio for some of the earlier modules that have been approved. I'll let you know how smoothly that process goes, but so far we have avoided quite a few re-recordings due to script changes recommended by our SMEs. It's complicated and technical, but a huge improvement in the quality of the voice over the built-in voices in Storyline. TTS is a great option for my organization as we don't have a set up that works for recording our own voices open concept office and lack of recording technology.

Our current recorded content sounds horrible and very unprofessional, so TTS is a much needed improvement for us! Lindsay - Could you provide more information on how you were able to complete this?

I've been unsuccessful in figuring out how to record and then import into Storyline. See the reference docs for a list of audio formats that are available. There are various options for different file types depending on your requirements. Use raw formats only when you know your downstream implementation can decode a raw bitstream, or if you plan on manually building headers based on bit-depth, sample-rate, number of channels, etc.

Similar to the example in the previous section, you use AudioDataStream to get an in-memory stream of the result, and then write it to a file. Speech Synthesis Markup Language SSML allows you to fine-tune the pitch, pronunciation, speaking rate, volume, and more of the text-to-speech output by submitting your requests from an XML schema. This section shows an example of changing the voice, but for a more detailed guide, see the SSML how-to article. To start using SSML for customization, you make a simple change that switches the voice.

See the full list of supported neural voices. Next, you need to change the speech synthesis request to reference your XML file. From here, the result object is exactly the same as previous examples. To fix this, right click the XML file and select Properties. Speech can be a good way to drive the animation of facial expressions.

Often visemes are used to represent the key poses in observed speech, such as the position of the lips, jaw and tongue when producing a particular phoneme. You can subscribe the viseme event in Speech SDK. Then, you can apply viseme events to animate the face of a character as speech audio plays.

Learn how to get viseme events. To run the examples in this article, include the following import and using statements at the top of your script. In this example, you create a SpeechConfig using a subscription key and region. Next, instantiate a SpeechSynthesizer , passing your config object and the audioConfig object as params.

First, remove the AudioConfig , as you will manage the output behavior manually from this point onward for increased control. Passing NULL for the AudioConfig , rather than omitting it like in the speaker output example above, will not play the audio by default on the current active output device.

The GetAudioData getter returns a byte [] of the output data. In this example you use the AudioDataStream. If you want to skip straight to sample code, see the Go quickstart samples on GitHub. Use the following code sample to run speech synthesis to your default audio output device. Running the script will speak your input text to default speaker. Run the following commands to create a go. See the reference docs for detailed information on the SpeechConfig and SpeechSynthesizer classes.

Then pass nil for the AudioConfig in the SpeechSynthesizer constructor. Passing nil for the AudioConfig , rather than omitting it like in the speaker output example above, will not play the audio by default on the current active output device.

The AudioData property returns a []byte of the output data. You can work with this []byte manually, or you can use the AudioDataStream class to manage the in-memory stream. If you want to skip straight to sample code, see the Java quickstart samples on GitHub.

To run the examples in this article, include the following import statements at the top of your script. Next, instantiate a SpeechSynthesizer passing your speechConfig object and the audioConfig object as params. Then, executing speech synthesis and writing to a file is as simple as running SpeakText with a string of text. This outputs to the current active output device. The SpeechSynthesisResult. The request is mostly the same, but instead of using the SpeakText function, you use SpeakSsml.

You can subscribe to viseme events in Speech SDK to get facial animation data, and then apply the data to a character during facial animation.

If you want to skip straight to sample code, see the JavaScript quickstart samples on GitHub. This article assumes that you have an Azure account and Speech service resource. If you don't have an account and resource, try the Speech service for free. If you just want the package name to install, run npm install microsoft-cognitiveservices-speech-sdk.

For guided installation instructions, see the get started article. For more information on require , see the require documentation. This class includes information about your resource, for example your subscription key, region, endpoint, host, and access token. The Azure Text to Speech service supports more than voices and over 70 languages and variants. Next, instantiate a SpeechSynthesizer passing your speechConfig and audioConfig objects as params. Now, writing synthesized speech to a file is as simple as running speakTextAsync with a string of text.

The result callback is a great place to call synthesizer. The call to synthesizer. Run the program, and a synthesized speech is written to a. You can choose to output the synthesized speech directly to a speaker instead of writing to a file. To synthesize speech from a web browser, instantiate the AudioConfig using the fromDefaultSpeakerOutput static function.

The audio is sent to the current active output device. You can build custom behavior including:. Then pass undefined for the AudioConfig in the SpeechSynthesizer constructor. Passing undefined for the AudioConfig , rather than omitting it like in the speaker output example above, will not play the audio by default on the current active output device. For server-code, convert the arrayBuffer to a buffer stream.

From here, you can implement any custom behavior using the resulting ArrayBuffer object. The ArrayBuffer is a common type to receive in a browser and play from this format. For any server-based code, if you need to work with the data as a stream, instead of an ArrayBuffer, you need to convert the object into a stream.

To change the audio format, you use the speechSynthesisOutputFormat property on the SpeechConfig object. This property expects an enum of type SpeechSynthesisOutputFormat , which you use to select the output format.

Similar to the example in the previous section, get the audio ArrayBuffer data and interact with it. The request is mostly the same, but instead of using the speakTextAsync function, you use speakSsmlAsync. For more information on readFileSync , see Node. Often visemes are used to represent the key poses in observed speech, such as the position of the lips, jaw, and tongue when producing a particular phoneme.

You can subscribe to the viseme event in Speech SDK. Then, you apply viseme events to animate the face of a character as speech audio plays. See the instructions. The sdk prefix is an alias used to name the require module. For more information on import , see export and import. For more information on require , see what is require? Run the program, and a synthesized audio is played from the speaker. From here you can implement any custom behavior using the resulting ArrayBuffer object.

The following samples assume that you have an Azure account and Speech service subscription. Click a link to see installation instructions for each sample:. If you want to skip straight to sample code, see the Python quickstart samples on GitHub.

For more information, see azure-cognitiveservices-speech. See System Requirements. Available on PC Mobile device Hub. Description With Text to Speech, your device will speak what you type or save as audio file. Show More. People also like. Flash Browser Free. QR Scanner Plus Free. Office Free. C Lite Browser Free. Additional information Published by NxeCcde24 Labs.

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