Stretch letters longer when spelling

[blockrocker]

Hi!

My question is kind of hard to explain and I'm sorry for that! The key thing is that I need to make Text Aloud give instructions to computer users.

At the moment I need Text Aloud to tell the user to press the "I" key on the keyboard. The problem is that Text Aloud will pronounce the "I" very fast without emphasizing it to make it clear it's a spelled letter (and not meaning I as in "I am"). How can I make Text Aloud sound like the spoken letter is meant as a direction for the user and not simply as a very quickly pronounced sound?

EDIT:
To make it easier to understand my problem, I uploaded a short sample clip on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGzk6QCs ... e=youtu.be

Notice how the I-key is pronounced in a weird and confusing manner when my purpose is to refer to that key on the keyboard.

[PHenry1026]

Greetings,

Depending on the voice you are using any of the following punctuations should accomplish what you are after:

Hit the I, key in order to add a key frame

Hit the I. Key in order to add a key frame

Hit the, I, key in order to add a key frame

For more control you could use the {{Pause=0.50}} tag, where 0.50 is the length of the pause and is a variable.

[Jim Bretti]

One other possibility might be to to use a speed tag to slow speaking for the phrase that is causing the problem.. You could try something like this:

Hit the <rate absspeed="-6">I key</rate> in order to add a key frame.

Don't know if that will help or not.

[blockrocker]

Thank you for your replys!

I have experimented with commas and speed tags before -without very good results. But I will give the period a try.

Somehow I was hoping this could be solved with the phonemes-feature, but maybe that's not the case?

[Jim Bretti]

There may be something you can do with phonemes to help, but I can't think of anything.

Does respelling "I" as "eye" help at all? Also, what happens if you speak a very small word, like the letter "a" silently, between "I" and "key" ... does something like that help with the two words running together? You can use the volume tag to speak text silently: <volume level="0">speak this text at volume 0</volume>

Also, what voice(s) are you using?

[PHenry1026]

To do what you are requesting using phonemes requires the use of regular expressions and also a voice that is SAPI 5 compatible that recognizes the silence character, _. For example if you have Ivona U.S. English voices you can use the following regular expression and respell:

(?#I key)(?m)(?:^|\s|['"‘“(]|\p{Pi}|\p{Ps}|\p{Pd})Hit the +\K(?-i)I(?i) key(?=[’”\p{Po}\p{Pe}\p{Pf}]{0,2}(?:\s|$))

<Pron sym="ay - _ k iy 1"/>

For even more emphasis, you can enter the following on the respell line.

<Pron sym="_"/> <Pron sym="ay - _ k iy 1"/>


P.S. What voice(s) are you using?

Thinking more about it, you do not need to use the regex above, you can use the phoneme directly as follows:

Hit the <Pron sym="ay - _ k iy 1"/> in order to add a key frame.

If none of the above suggestions work for you, you can record the exact tone you want and use a regex (like the one above) and an audio tag - {{Audio=C:\\example.wav}} - to get it just right.