Question about Text Aloud 3 and Speed

[caricatur]

I have a few of the loq voices and one from neospeech installed. loq has some registry edits that let you increase the maxspeed percentage, but the slidebar on textaloud does not produce any difference. Neospeech voices can be controlled Voice Text Markup Language (VTML) tags to go up to 400%. Is there any way to do this in text aloud? Or does TA enforce a limit. It seems most voices go 1.5-2x faster than the default. I always export everything because even the fastest speeds on TA are just too slow. I can probably use Microsoft Mary or similar voice to go faster, but then I sacrifice clarity, and those free voices tend to be too difficult to understand even at slower speeds. Is there anything I can do within TA to increase the speed? A registry edit, or something similar to vtml? or a way to enable VTML? All the voices I have go up to 10 speed (which is slightly under 2) but after that no change.

Is this a limitation of the TA 3 engine, or exclusive to the voice themselves. Anyone know of any remedies to this.

[Jim Bretti]

There is not a way to enable VTML, and there are no registry edits available to help. TextAloud uses Sapi5's markup for controlling voice speed, and the Sapi5 spec defines a range from -10 to +10. We've seen a few voices support speeds outside this range, so the speed slider in TextAloud uses a range from -30 to +30.

If your voices aren't handling speed settings from the slider control, you could also try setting speeds using the Absolute Speed tag in your text ... from the TextAloud menu, click Insert Tags -> Absolute Speed.

These are the only controls currently available in TextAloud for controlling voice speed.