Pause duration problem

[dunkmyster]

It seems my previous post didn't get posted, and since I have done some more testing with my French voices, I am re-posting. I am trying to insert a 20 second pause {{Pause=20}}. The Acapela Julie22 will pause for 8 seconds, and the following voices pause for about 33 seconds: AT&T Juliette16, Nuance Amelie22, and ScanSoft Sebastien22. I haven't tested with my English voices, but I remember having the same problems with them also. I noticed another post on this subject from 6 years ago: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=6213. Thanks.

[Jim Bretti]

We see this problem sometimes, some voices loose accuracy with longer pauses or don't handle them at all. I don't know of any fixes for the problem, but one workaround that has worked is to break long pauses into multiple, shorter pauses. If you can get 8 second pauses to work accurately, use that as your maximum pause duration. Then instead of using {{Pause=20}}, try: {{Pause=8}} {{Pause=8}} {{Pause=4}}

To simplify this, you can use TextAloud pronunciation dictionary maintenance to create your own pause 'tags'. For example, you create an entry in pronunciation dictionary maintenance that respells the text ##Pause20 as the three pauses above. So you would create separate dictionary entries for each long pause duration you need.

Does that help?