Speech Error: SSML input not valid

[PHenry1026]

Greetings Jim,

I have found the problem with Ivona voices that crashes TextAloud and produces the error message: Speech Error: SSML input not valid; cannot find 'speak' element (Error 80045003).

The problem is caused by the following regular expression and Sapi 5 Pronunciation tag used on Respell line, when used in TextAloud Pronunciation Dictionary Maintenance:

(?#several years)(?m)(?:^|\s|['"‘“(]|\p{Pi}|\p{Ps}|\p{Pd})\Kseveral years(?!['’‘´]?[a-z])(?=[’”\p{Po}\p{Pe}\p{Pf}]{0,2}(?:\s|$))


<Pron sym="s eh v 1 r ax l & y iy r s 1"/>


TextAloud interprets the legitimate Sapi 5 Pronunciation tag <Pron sym="s eh v 1 r ax l & y iy r s 1"/> as an SSML tag.

If the & in the tag is replaced with a "-": for example, <Pron sym="s eh v 1 r ax l - y iy r s 1"/>, TextAloud will interpret the tag properly as Sapi 5 Pronunciation tag and it will not crash TextAloud.

The problem, therefore, clearly appears to be an error introduce by TextAloud since <Pron sym="s eh v 1 r ax l & y iy r s 1"/> crashes TextAloud when used with Ivona Voices and all other voices (AT&T, Cepstral, etc.)


<Pron sym="s eh v 1 r ax l & y iy r s 1"/>, is a valid Sapi 5 Pronunciation tag and worked in previous versions of TextAloud. This problem with & causing a problem in the pronunciaton tag had occurred before and you had previously fixed it.

[Jim Bretti]

The problem is that if you use the respell option to write your own xml, there are some characters, including the & character, that need to be escaped. (& by itself has its own meaning in xml). To include the & character in your xml, here is how your respell text should look:

<Pron sym="s eh v 1 r ax l & y iy r s 1"/>

If you set Pronounce Using to Phonemes instead of Respell, this is handled automatically. So with Pronounce Using set to Phonemes, your phoneme string would be s eh v 1 r ax & y iy r s 1

[Regie]

I made a post some minutes ago about having this problem. As best I discovered, I had gone into the Control Panel, Settings and had set up in Voice Rules, Speaking Rules, Voice Changes and had set it up such that parenthesis around a word or phrase would be read by a different voice. Today when I brought in a new article that had ( ) in it, it would bring me immediately to the error message. If I removed all else in the article from that parenthesis onward, it would read it. So now I have unchecked the option to "Speak text in parenthesis using voice" and it is working fine.

I am glad that I finally discovered how to change voices without having to always go through the menu choice of inserting tags, voice change, and then choosing the voice I want. Using single and double quotes around text is a lot faster and better for me.

Maybe this message might help someone who someday may have a similar problem.

Regie

[Jim Bretti]

Hi Reggie

There are some fixes in fairly recent versions of TextAloud for this speech error when using the option to change voices for text in parentheses. Make sure you're running the latest version, 4.0.62. If you're running an older version visit https://nextup.com/download.html and download the 4.0.62 installer.

If that doesn't help send me an email at jim@nextup.com and I'll give you instructions on how we can debug the problem.