Tips for improving 'naturalness' of a voice?

[tomtt2]

I'm using both TA2 and TA3 to read shortstories. I've tried the AT&T Rich and Mike voices, but find that the NeoSpeech Paul voice sounds the most natural.

I keep looking for ways to improve the naturalness of the way the stories are read and found that using commas, pauses and lines returns works well to get the pace of a spoken sentence correct. The punctuation editor has made it possible to get the words pronounced correctly in most cases (saying Neal Sedaka is still a challenge).

What continues to be a struggle is controling the emphasised word in a sentence or the emphasised sylable withing a word. I tried the SAPI 5 EMPH command, but can tell little or know difference in how a word is spoken.

Does anyone out there have any tips for controling the emphasis on a word or sylable?

Thanks~

[PHenry1026]

To pronounce Neil Sedaka correctly you should use a Phoneme Editor: If you are using TA3 do the following:

1. Enter the Pronunciation Dictionary Maintenance

2. Choose a Dictionary for the entry (Language English must be enabled for this entry)

3. Select New Entry

4. Choose Text Matching [Simple Text]: Neil Sedaka

5. Choose Pronounce Using: Phonemes and enter n iy l 1 s ax - d ae k 1 ax
as the phoneme.

6. Click OK and exit from the Pronunciation Dictionary Maintenance

Since you have AT&T Natural Voice, it may be more efficient for you to set up this pronunciation edit using AT&T Natural Voices phoneme editor available at

C:\Program Files\ATTNaturalVoices\TTS1.4\Desktop\data\en_us.dict

The phoneme if you are using AT&T phoneme editor would be n iy l 1 s ax 0 d ae k 1 ax 0

0 = syllable not stressed
1 = syllable has primary stress

Percy Henry

[tomtt2]

Thanks Percy.

The phoneme you provided worked well in both the AT&T editor and the TA3 editor. In both cases, I played with the 1/0 positioning, but couldn't really tell any difference. The creation of emphasis is still a challenge.

I'll try the 1/0 technique with some other words and see what I get.

Thanks for the response.

Tom T