VTML tags in Text to Speech !
VTML (VoiceText Markup Language) - This Powerful hidden gem in Text to Speech helps you control the generated speech by adding pause, changing the pitch etc !
This post on customizing text to speech Pronunciations received many comments requesting a way to control the generated speech with html like tags.
The interesting thing is that this feature is already there in Captivate 4 ! Even more interesting is the fact that it is so simple to use. All you need to do is insert the appropriate tags into the slide notes. You can type in (or copy paste) the tags just like you do any other text.
Just before making this post, I quickly tried few of them:
1. Hello I am here <vtml_pause time="1000"/> for a break: Introduces a pause of 1 sec in between.
2. <vtml_speed value="50"> This is my text </vtml_speed>: Helps you control the speed of the text
There are many more similar useful tags. The VTML tags are listed in the Appendix C of the document here. It has a examples as well on the usage.
Comments
Grrrr - I spent ages looking for something like this a couple of months ago and didn;t find it.
THANK YOU - now I can make TTS sound more natural in Captivate :-D
Steve
Posted by: Steve Howard | April 27, 2009 6:13 PM
Great revelation, more of that please!
Posted by: Lieve Weymeis | April 28, 2009 1:00 AM
Great revelation, more of that please!
Posted by: Lieve Weymeis | April 28, 2009 1:02 AM
I think it is a shame that a company like Adobe selected a proprietary control method like vtml??? The industry already has a well established standard... SSML (speech synthesis markup language). Why tie customers to a proprietary non-standards based method? Who are the speech engines that support this besides your Korean partner? Will my high-quality Cepstral voices take advantage of this?
Even more vexing...vtml is a copy of SSML. Brilliant - take an open standard and slightly change all the descriptors so they don't work with other engines. How difficult would it have been to support the proper SSML method that ALL speech engines conform to? I'm going to take a second time-out now.
Posted by: Craig Campbell | April 28, 2009 2:22 AM
Just a simple question, is it possible to change the encoding quality of the T2S engine from 16khz/16bit to 44khz/16 bits.
Posted by: Eric Martineau | May 13, 2009 12:06 AM
Leive,
I can understand your frustration, but the VTML standard was created by the company that created the particular voices/TS Engine used (their engineers were also involved in the SSML standard, go figure), and I've included a link to the US version of the VoiceText User's Guide. https://ondemand.neospeech.com/vt_eng-Engine-VTML-v3.9.0-3.pdf
Neospeech also has a web-based service that DOES accept SSML at http://ws.neospeech.com, but for SSML support you do have to pay - but they DO have a free account for folks that have limited TTS conversion needs.
Unfortunately for us, there are not very many good quality TTS voices that are within the range of the average developers pocketbook. Neospeech voices were probably choosen for their willingness to sub-license their voices per application - that's why it works within captivate only (or so I assume).
Personally, Loquendo voices are by far the best I've heard, and they also have there own emotion mark-up langauge which makes their voices appear very natural - it's almost spooky. But, their licensing is also very expensive, and unless you plan on creating a lot of e-learning it's a bit pricey. They also sub-license their voices to individual applications, such as Character Builder (Flash-based character scripting/animation program) http://www.mediasemantics.com
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