Accent on some words

[Teatimest]

I want to make the program pronounce a word "abscond." It has accent on "ab" but that should be on "scond." How can I correct?

I use ver. 1.479 with AT&T Crystal16 on WinNT.

[kdwhite]

You can try the advanced editor, info below. However, AT&T voices do a very poor job responding to the advanced emphasis commands:

The help is a little confusing related to this. The phonemes button is only available in certain cases. IN particular, when using the AT&T Natural Voices via the SAPI5 interface. By default TextAloud uses these via SAPI4, because it is more stable and has a couple of features TextAloud uses that aren't available in SAPI5 (such as progress updates while speaking to an audio file).

Assuming you have version 1.459 or later of TextAloud, go to the Misc Options TAB and you should see a selection there for the sapi version. Set that to Sapi5 Only, then Options->Pronunciation Editor should have an advanced TAB available which will let you create new pronunciation for words using phonemes.

[teatimest]

Thank you very much, but if I choose SAPI 5 only, I get "OLE error 8004503A" message and it does not work. How can I fix this?

[kdwhite]

Try downloading and installing SAPI5 from
http://www.nextup.com/sapi.html

[teatimest]

Thank you. It works, but it is tedious and strenuous to correct this way. And it does not always work.

[teatimest]

Is there any way to use pronunciation code found in dictionary to enter phoneme? If I look up a word "abscond" in Merriam-Webster Online (http://www.m-w.com/), it shows pronunciation code as ab-'skänd. Is there any way to translate code into phoneme?

[Jim Bretti]

There isn't currently a way to automatically translate a pronunciation from webster's into phonemes. You still need to pick through the phoneme list and find the ones that match.

It is an interesting idea though, maybe in a future release we could come up with something that would perform this conversion automatically.