Can I correct which syllable in a word receives emphasis ?

[Jim Bretti]

Occasionally you’ll find that voice engines will pronounce words with the emphasis placed on the wrong syllable. There is currently not much you can do to control this within TextAloud.

About the best thing you can do in general is to see if there is a way to use the TextAloud Basic Pronunciation Editor to work around the pronunciation. Just as an example, you can change how the word “today” is pronounced by creating an entry in the pronunciation editor, specifying the pronunciation as “two day”.

If you happen to be using AT&T Natural Voices (US English only), there is a slight chance you may be able to change how emphasis is placed using the TextAloud Advanced Pronunciation Editor. There are phonemes available to specify which syllable of a word should receive emphasis, but for the most part Natural Voices will ignore these emphasis characters.

Note that the Advanced Pronunciation editor currently works only with Natural Voices (US English), and to use it, you need to change the Sapi Version on the Voices and File Options panel to “Use Sapi5 Only”.