Quote:
Originally Posted by jackie_w
I've never seen any SSML tag in a purchased ebook. Who is creating them?
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I don't think any real books do include SSML content (though I believe some arcane corner of the EPUB3 spec does provide a way to embed SSML in a book file). SSML is used, internally, by an e-reading app that wants to read some text aloud. Broadly speaking, the app has to construct a string of text, and pass it to the device's text-to-speech engine, which will then speak it.
For best results, that string of text should be SSML, not plain text. If the app decides that some part of the text should be read differently (e.g. 'with emphasis') based on some feature of the book content (e.g. tags h?, em, or whatever), then the app has to put the relevant SSML tags (<emphasis> in this case) around that part of the SSML text.
I'm currently working to get this to happen in Freda. It works OK in Windows, because the Windows TTS engine does understand <emphasis> in SSML. But on Android it doesn't seem to do anything; the TTS engine accepts <emphasis> tags, but ignores them (as far as I can tell).