Ivona voice (Salli) sounds different

[issamchabaa]

Hi, I've been checking and testing differents voices available on the NextUp site and I fell for three of them.
Once installed, I'm not sure that the voices I heard before are the ones purchased. They sound significantly better in the demos. Namely : Ava and Nathan from Nuance and Salli from Ivona. No way to tell for sure for the first two as they only have a fixed set of sentences as a demo. But with the voice (Salli) from the Ivona collection you can type any word of your choice and hear the rendition, and Boom, it does not sound the same. In fact, even the pronounciation is different : "nine pm" is pronounced correctly "nine peeam" on the demo and on my TexAloud engine it says "nine pee. em. as P.M. two separate letters. The Salli voice came in a bundle with TexAloud 4.
Are the speech engines the same? Are there different versions of the same voice ? WTH ? I'm pretty mad because I spent a lot of time choosing the voices, and now I'm not getting what I was promised.
Any clue ?

[Jim Bretti]

Sorry about the problem. For the online demos it is possible that voices used by the online speech service are different versions than what we currently have available. We'll do some checking and see if we can find the problem. If you send an email to support@nextup.com, the support desk will help with exchanging voices or refunding your purchase.

On the "nine pm" problem you mentioned with Salli, I gave that a try here and the voice seemed to pronounce "pm" correctly. I created a TextAloud article, typed in the text "It is nine pm in the evening." and spoke the article with Salli. If you have pronunciation dictionaries configured in TextAloud, or have any speaking rules configured in TextAloud Settings, that could possibly explain the problem.

If pronunciation dictionaries / speaking rules are not the problem, could you send me a sample of text where you're hearing incorrect pronunciations with Salli? To send the text, first duplicate the problem with a text sample in a TextAloud article, then export the article to a text file using File -> Save Article As Text File. Attach the text file to an email and send to me at jim@nextup.com