Forcing words to be spelled

Moderator: Jim Bretti

Post Reply
Jim Bretti
Posts: 1558
Joined: Wed Oct 29, 2003 11:07 am
Contact:

Forcing words to be spelled

Post by Jim Bretti »

It is possible for voice engines to 'pronounce' acronyms as words, when you'd rather have them spelled out. For example, the college admissions test SAT may be pronounced as the word 'sat', instead of S A T.

To correct this problem, create a pronunciation dictionary entry, and set the "Pronounce Using" dropdown to "Spell Text".

For the "Text Matching" dropdown, use "Simple Text" if you're just trying to correct individual words, or use "Regular Expression" if you want to use a pattern match.

If you want to be sure that all uppercase words over some length are spelled, you can use a regular expression that matches upper case text. Using a length of 3 as an example, the following expression matches upper case words with a length of 3 or greater.

(?<=\b)[A-Z]{3,}(?=\b)

Select the "Case Sensitive" checkbox.

Here is a little explanation on the regular expression. The \b characters above represent word boundary characters. So (?<=\b) and (?=\b) in the expression force word boundary characters before and after the pattern. The pattern itself, [A-Z]{3,} is looking for 3 or more occurrences of characters between A and Z. Selecting the Case Sensitive checkbox ensures that the match is case sensitive.
Jim Bretti
NextUp.com
Post Reply