Minpronunciation is almost all voices of read vs read

[amber438]

Hi
Almost all of my voices pronounce read as reed even what sentence dictates in certain instances it should sound like red. How can I fix this?
I use Neospeech and Ivona voices.
Thanks
Gayle

[PHenry1026]

Hi Gayle,

Do you currently have any entries in your Pronunciation Dictionary Maintenance (PDM) or are you using any TextAloud dictionaries to correct for these type of errors?


First, correcting for the mispronunciation of the homograph read can be done but it is not an easy task. For example in the following sentence the correction can be done, but it cannot be easily generalized if it is mispronounced by the voice:

Many, many years ago, I read, and read again, and again, a book of short stories by Frederick Forsyth, No Comebacks.

With good regular expression entries you can get the error rate of mispronounced homographs to between zero and three mispronunciations for twenty-four hours of continuous reading. This however, requires over 1,800 regular expression entries that just corrects for the mispronunciation of the homograph read.


Second, there is a bug in Ivona voices. With some phrases Ivona voices will over-ride the correction reed and will still pronounce the word as red. To get around this bug you will have to replace reed with the phoneme tag <Pron sym="r iy d 1"/>. However this replacement is only valid for Ivona US English voices.

[amber438]

Thanks PHenry
I have your RC SAPI 5 installed and also have a very small dictionary of my own.
It's only for audiobooks I make out of epub files of mine and, for the most part, everything is fine. But this seems to bug me for some reason. Also I can't get bridget from neospeech to pronounce Lycan the way it should be. She says lihcan instead of liecan no matter what I do. In fact every british voice I have does that.
It seems like the fix for read vs read is involved.

[PHenry1026]

Greetings Gayle,

RC SAPI 5 has improved significantly since your purchase; for information on obtaining a free update please see the following Post.

I could not find Lycan in any standard reference but I listened to a pronunciation of Lycan on forvo.com. If the pronunciation on forvo.com is correct, then the IPA pronunciation of Lycan is given by the following:

/ˈlaɪ.kən/

You can find information on changing the pronunciation of a word in NeoSpeech in the following Post.

[amber438]

Thanks PHenry! I'll give it a try now!