Problem with NeoSpeech Paul 16

[D.Leikin]

Paul 16 I acquired this month from NextUp.com displays several artefacts that do not show up in NeoSpeech.com demo version. Among these are unwanted clicks and unexpected volume leaps. Also, the voice significantly differs in intonation from that presented by NeoSpeech interactive demo.

Here are examples over which Paul 16 definitely stumbles:
(i) <<Dr. Smith lives on Yellow Dr.>> (the voice produces a distinct click in preposition “on”);
(ii) <<He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted and rather selfish is to be ill-disposed: but he was, in general, well respected;>> (fist “ill-disposed” is pronounced with a sudden increase in volume, and no pause is made after the second “ill-disposed”).

I am wondering what makes Paul 16 so different from its demo (is it a version mismatch, or difference in TTS behaviour on a server platform, or interference with other voices installed on the system, or etc.) and how the problem can be resolved.

Could someone help me find answers to these questions?
Thanks in advance for your efforts
Dmitry

[SFCurley]

I'm not noticing them when I listed to the samples. Running the current beta ver: 2.155.

[D.Leikin]

I am glad to hear that. Unfortunately, this cannot fix the problem. At the moment, NextUp provides customers with TA2147.

[D.Leikin]

I have migrated to TA2155 but the upgrade did not resolve the problem.

[Jim Bretti]

Dmitry

I'm able to hear the same artifacts in the sample sentences you gave.

For some of these kinds of problems, you may be able to work around using the pronunciation editor. For example, defining the phrase "ill-disposed" in the basic pronunciation editor as "illdisposed" (one word) seems to help with the volume increase. It seems like this problem might be related to how/where the word "disposed" is used in a sentence; I hear it in other cases but not all the time.

On the problem with no pause after the colon, you could create an entry in the pronunciation editor to treat colons as semicolons like this:
Word &:
Pronunciation ;

The & in the word field above is needed to allow characters to the left of the colon. By default, substitutions are performed when the string in the word field actually falls on a word boundary.

I'm not having much luck with the click in the sentence Dr. Smith lives on Yellow Dr. It just seems that something about that sentence is causing a problem with the voice ... If I change it to "Joe lives on Yellow Dr", or add extra punctuation to the sentence, I don't hear the click.

So it sounds like you're running across some problems with some sentence constructs, and about the best you can do is see if you can work around using the pronunciation editor.

[D.Leikin]

Dear Jim,

Thank you for your detailed answer. The pronunciation editor does the job.

Dmitry
P.S.
Of course, it is unreasonable to demand TTS engine to be error-free, and I do not care much about minor pronunciation mistakes. The thing I was trying to clear up is why Paul’s voice does not match that advertised on NeoSpeech.com and if there is a way to make it work the way NeoSpeech online interactive demo does. Apparently, this demo TTS is not running across any problem with the same sentence constructs.