Hello, and thank you for an insanely helpful application.
It helps my "reading up" as I commute to and from the university.
I have a suggestion though, that would be greatly appreciated if implemented.
My native language is Danish, and I "TTS-read" a lot of text in danish. However, a lot of the literature text contains English phrases. In MS WORD you have the option of selecting text and setting a different language (eg. english). It would be very nice if Text Aloud would automatically follow that "language formatting", with a default voice for each installed language (set of voices), hence automatically switching as it reads along through the text.
Thank you for considering this.
In addition or at least as another option, it could also be cool if the option for a different voice in an alternate language would be offered as an option in the pronunciation dialog. Eg. enabling the option for setting a different voice for certain matched words.
There is actually a way to use the pronunciation editor to change voices for matched words. We need to make this easier, but here is how to do it.
First, in the TextAloud main window, open a new, blank article. Then, click Insert Tags in the main menu, and look for the Voice Change menu entry. All your installed voices should appear as menu items associated with Voice Change, and clicking any voice will insert a voice change tag in your blank article. To use the pronunciation editor to change voices for matched text, you can 'respell' the matched text using a voice change tag at the start of the text, along with an 'end tag' to return to the previous voice.
For example, the voice change tag for AT&T Mike looks like this: <voice required="name = Mike16">. Say you want AT&T Mike to pronounce the words "one", "two", and "three". You can create a pronunciation dictionary entry that uses a regular expression to test for words in this list, and use the voice change tag in the respell field to do the voice change. Here is what the entry could look like:
If you're not familiar with regular expressions it is a pattern matching language. In the above expression, read the vertical bars as 'or', so the dictionary entry will match any of the words one, two, or three. Then in the respell field, $0 references the matched text. So Mike is used to pronounce the matched word, and the </voice> end tag causes speaking to switch back to the original voice.
We plan to simplify how this is done in future versions. Just post again if you have trouble getting this to work or have questions.
That's actually very clever, and a little bit amusing as well, since it's a bit trivial once explained .
I am familiar with regular expression, and use it from time to time, so I fully appreciate what you explained.
It does make sense to make a bit more available to the "non-computer-scientist"
But at least the option is available.
