Cereproc Stewart voice and unwanted pauses

[Beninoz53]

Hi, up until now, my main voice has been Amy from Ivona, and I've had no issues with longer than expected pauses after punctuation. However, with my new CereProc voice, I get slightly longer pauses after commas and dialogue quotes than I'd expect. I've tried adjusting the pauses using the automatic pause settings, but they don't seem to do anything.
Have you had this issue with this voice before?

[Jim Bretti]

First check to make sure all TextAloud speaking rules and pronunciation dictionaries are disabled, just to make sure the some TextAloud configuration setting is not adding the pause.

If this has no effect, all voices have some built in way of changing inflection and pausing at punctuation characters. There is not a way to override this behavior with TextAloud settings.

One rough alternative would be to configure TextAloud to *replace* commas with pauses. You could control the pause duration, but you would lose the inflection changes at commas. You would need to create a TextAloud pronunciation dictionary to do these replacements. If you wanted to try it, create a pronunciation dictionary entry, with Text Matching set to Simple Text, and replace comma characters with a pause. Use {{Pause=0.25}} for a quarter second pause. You'll need to set the Word Boundary Condition dropdown to "No Word Boundary Required".

The only other thing I can think of would be to experiment with different punctuation characters. It may be possible to configure TextAloud to replace commas with some other character(s) that both cause a shorter pause and preserve intonation changes.

[Beninoz53]

Ok, so do I put {{Pause=0.25}} in the Text matching field or the pronounce using field?
I've put a comma in the first field and {{Pause=0.25}} in the second field, but nothing seems any different. I've clearly done something wrong.

[Jim Bretti]

Here's a better explanation on how to configure the dictionary entry.

Set the Text Matching dropdown to Simple Text, and place a comma in the text matching field.

Set the Pronounce Using dropdown to Respell, and for the respelling use
{{Pause=0.25}}

You also need to set the Word Boundary Condition dropdown to "No Word Boundary Required".

Then, make sure the dictionary and dictionary entry are both enabled.

Does that help?

[Sniked]

Hi, I noticed this issue after updating my CereProc voices from version 5 to version 6. It only affects reading text aloud and is present in any SAPI5 program I try, even in Speech Properties built into Windows. Audio files that I create in TextAloud are completely fine.

[Sniked]

As an update to the issue - CereProc released a new version of their voices - v.6.1. The pausing problem isn't there anymore but I only tried the new versions on a newly bought and speedy PC.