Moods for TextAloud - sad or upbeat

[sulu]

It would be great if we could have the power to set the mood of a reading voice. If we chose 'sad' the voice would lilt downward, would elongate the syllables in some words, especially at the end of a sentence. If we choose upbeat, we get pretty much what we hear now when the voices read the news.

Incidentally, it would be nice to have a "hard news voice" like you would have heard in 1974 on American Television.

-Su Llewellyn

[Jim Bretti]

This is an area we hope to improve on, but you can do currently do something close to what you're looking for with Acapela's emotive voices. See https://nextup.com/acapela.html, and scroll almost to the bottom of the page, looking for the section "Acapela™ High Quality Emotive Voices for TextAloud". With these emotive voices you can choose the mood for speaking by selecting 'happy', 'sad' versions of the voice. Each 'mood' is implemented as a separate voice, so you can change moods in the middle of TextAloud articles using voice change tags.