ClaroRead and ScanSoft Tom

[kremesch]

have been playing around with ClaroRead and Word 2007 since I installed it, and I've noticed a strange glitch when using ScanSoft Tom.

With words like taking, take, talk, tap, tapping, etc., ClaroRead insists on pronouncing them like: choking, toke, toke, top, topping, etc.

I've attempted to make edits in the pronunciation editor, with fixes similar to the following: te-aik, for the word take, and similar edits for the rest, mainly because it insists on pronouncing the letter A as if it were an O. It seemed to be a suitable fix within the editor. But when ClaroRead started reading it from the document the second time around, it insisted on the original mispronunciations again.

Has anyone else run into this problem? And if so, have they been able to find a suitable workaround? Or is this a glitch?

[kdwhite]

Have you tried the same text in TextAloud with Tom?

[kremesch]

Yes. and it works perfectly.

[DaveH]

I believe that ClaroRead uses omnipage for the OCR and Tom is one of the scansoft voices used in omnipage. When I installed omnipage 16 (independently of ClaroRead) there was a conflict between my TA scansoft voices and Omnipage scansoft voices. Both appeared in the TA voices list but only the omnipage voices worked. To get the TA voices back I reinstalled a TA scansoft voice after which only TA voices worked in both TA and omnipage. Maybe something similar is going on here!

[kremesch]

I've learned to always install Nuance and Scansoft first, for that very reason. I even go a step further to remove the former tokens from the registry simply so I don't have to look at things that don't work :)

But on that note, I've had all sorts of strange things happening on my system lately, and a lot of frustration with TTS & STT, along with the voices. There's something going on in my system that I can't seem to hunt down, even though I suspect where the fun may have started, considering I wasn't having these problems before. As a result, I gave up and reformatted.

Maybe I'll give ClaroRead another go and see if it's any better this time around. In the meantime, I think I'll just stick with the other program I'm using and cross my fingers in the hopes that TA will, one day, allow me to use it within word, if not only for the highlighting and use of its dictionary. In all honesty, I can't seem to find anything that I like better than TA anyway.

Regards.

[kremesch]

Hm, I just tried the trial on another machine out of curiosity, and discovered what the problem is. In the editor, I changed the pronunciation of ta to to (it's part of a character's speech in something I'm proofing), and for some reason it effects ever word that starts with ta. Is there a way to stop it from doing that, a setting, maybe? I must admit, it's not a feature I'm particularly fond of.

[kdwhite]

We haven't had time to spend a lot of time in the app yet, so I don't know the answer to this yet. Hopefully we'll get some time soon or another user wills tep in with some suggetsions.

[DaveH]

Hm, I just tried the trial on another machine out of curiosity, and discovered what the problem is. In the editor, I changed the pronunciation of ta to to (it's part of a character's speech in something I'm proofing), and for some reason it effects ever word that starts with ta. Is there a way to stop it from doing that, a setting, maybe? I must admit, it's not a feature I'm particularly fond of.

You could try a regular expression. I'm a bit rusty but think that the following should work. Delete the existing edit before using the regex.

Word: {{re=\b\s(ta)\s\b}}
pronunciation: <s>to<s>

It tested OK with expression:
Go ta the wall tap ta the wall atap.

[kremesch]

I didn't think Claroread supported regex. But, when I enter what you posted into the editor, it re-writes itself as follows, and doesn't appear to recognise the edit. It ignores it all together.

This is what it does:
word to replace: {{re
new pronunciation: \b\s(ta)\s\b}}=<s>to</s>

As far as TextAloud goes though, I don't need the expression. The edit for ta to to works just fine, and it doesn't affect any other words with ta in them.