Automatic pauses

[Bunger Henry]

I have been using TA2 and have a question about TA3.

As many people may remember, one of the issues with automatic pauses after paragraphs in TA2 for Neospeech voices is that the voice often fails to recognize the end of the paragraph as the end of a sentence. The voice inflection sounds strange at the end of a paragraph when this happens.

The workaround for this is to insert pause tags such as {{Pause=2}} in the copied text at the beginning of each new paragraph. Can anyone tell me if this problem remains in the TA3 version of the software? I believe the problem was noticeable in Neospeech voices but not in many other voices.

[Jim Bretti]

I'm not seeing the problem in TA3, but I'm not seeing it in TA2 either. Can you send me a small sample of text where you're seeing the problem? If you can, mail it to me at jim@nextup.com. Let me know how to configure my pauses, and where to look for the problem when listening to the text.

[Bunger Henry]

It must have been a common problem that was noted during the development of TA2, because if you go to "Options," then "Textaloud Options," then the tab for "Predefined Pauses" there is a note, which you click on to read about the issue I'm talking about.

I will try to create a good example later and send it, but one way you could replicate it is to enter a yes/no type of question, with predefined pauses for paragraphs set at something other than zero, and another paragraph after the question. The Neospeech voice will often ignore the question mark, so the question sounds more like a phrase. The voice doesn't go up at the end like a question. Similarly, for sentences, the voice doesn't lower at the end of the sentence. It just has a neutral inflection.