Text to Speech Feature of Adobe Captivate
Text to Speech is certainly one of the coolest features of Captivate 4. e-Learning course developers no longer need to budget for the time and cost of audio creation. This adds a new dimension to rapid authoring. And where individual users like trainers, managers, and software developers are concerned, they can now independently create a movie complete with audio.
All you need to do to generate the audio for a slide is add slide notes and select a voice. Captivate converts the slide notes into audio in seconds. If you want to generate audio for multiple slides in one go, you can use the Speech Management option.
The step-by-step procedures for converting text to speech are documented here.
The converted speech sounds pretty good. Common abbreviations like TOC and SAP are converted intelligently. If required, you can even customize the text to speech dictionary and alter a pronunciation. Or you can add VoiceText Markup Language (VHTML) tags in the slide notes to add a pause or tweak the speed of the generated audio.
Mukul Vinay Lele gives step-by-step instructions for customizing pronunciations here.
For more information about VTML tags, read this post by Sony Kadavan.
Comments
I have a problem with controling the speed of the speech agent. They speed too fast and I have tried and insert "silence" but it does not work.
Any idea?
Posted by: Lorraine | August 7, 2009 1:41 AM
Lorraine, you can use VTML tags to add a pause or control the speed of the generated speech. My own experiment shows that adding a pause works better than changing the speed. Here's how you do it:
To insert a pause of 1 second, add <vtml_pause time="1000"/> where you want the pause.
For example: Search for <vtml_pause time="1000"/> 'context'.
You can find a list of VTML tags here:
http://www.neospeech.com/manual/vt_kor-Engine-API-References-v3.7.0%20(english_translation).pdf
Posted by: Nandini Gupta
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August 14, 2009 3:05 PM