Speaking dialogue in a different voice from that of the narr

[comanna]

Hello list,

I am new to the TA forum but I have been using TA for many years now and I love it! I am looking for help with a task that I have set myself. I have a story that contains a descriptive narration with occasional dialogue from different characters. I am using Scansoft Moira because I find it the clearest speaking for my purposes. Unfortunately, this voice does not change pitch so I cannot easily represent male and female voices with different settings.

I would like to keep all the dialogue in Scansoft Moira without changing it for each character but make the speech slower and slightly louder than the narrative voice.

I thought I might set up a dictionary definition for the opening and closing tags by looking for the single quote (') marks that mark the boundnaries of each. I can find " '" for the opening ones and "' " for the closing ones. I succeeded in getting the dictionary to substitute the speech rate and volume opening tags to the " '" tag and the test accepted this. However, when I applied the closing tags to the element "' " the dictionary test rejected this setting as an error.

I could make this change using search and replace in the document itself but I do not want to hard code the tags into the written text unless I have no other option.

Does anyone have any proven way of handling this situation? Am I on a hiding to nothing?

All the best,

Cearbhall

[Jim Bretti]

Hi Cearbhall

You should be able to make this work with one dictionary entry that looks like this:

Text Matching: Regular Expression

For the regular expression, use this: (just copy and paste into the regular expression field)
(?<=\s')(\w.+?)(?='\s)

Pronounce Using: Respell

For the Respell field, use:
<voice required="name = Scansoft Moira_Full_22kHz">$1</voice>

If you run into an problems post here or send me an email at jim@nextup.com and we should be able to make it work.