Very short {{Pause=0.01}}

[nextupUser]

I am trying to control the rate at which a sentence is read, and to make it sound more natural, I need to insert very slight pauses in between certain words. It looks like the {{Pause=X}} tag is limited in how low it can go. Is there some other way to add a very short (fraction of a second) delay between two words?

Thanks!

[Jim Bretti]

Sapi5 pauses values are in milliseconds, so the smallest pause Sapi5 will support is 1 millisecond, or {{Pause=0.001}}. The smallest pause you can actually get may be voice dependent though, I don't know for sure.

If you can't get something in the range of {{Pause=0.001}} to work, adding some punctuation, a semi-colon for example, may be another option.

[nextupUser]

Hmm looks like the problem may have been the voice. Neospeech Julie seems to work with {{Pause=0.001}}, Ivona Salli does not (there is no difference between {{Pause=0.001}} and {{Pause=0.1}}).

Is this a bug in TextAloud or the voice itself?

[Jim Bretti]

TextAloud doesn't do anything voice specific with pause tags, we just translate {{Pause=0.001}} to the sapi5 xml tag <silence msec="1"/>, or a corresponding sapi4 tag for old sapi4 voices. So sounds like you're running into a limitation with Ivona voices. I don't have any other information, but if I hear of anything I'll post it here.