MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Telling a text-to-speech reader how to pronounce things?

Quoth · 11-13-2021, 08:15 AM

I was using a text to speech markup on DOS in 1991 for UI of an Ice Cream making machine running on a PC. To save money the audio DAC wasn't a sound card but eight resistors on the parallel port driving a cheap IC amp on one of the custom controiller PCBs.

The issue with a book is that a human has to proof read the entire book adding the markup and the CSS route is horribly flawed.

There is such a disconnect written & pronounced and so many exceptions to rules that really natural text to speech needs a separate file. Actually English speech isn't quite the same language as written English. Compare a play, TV, film script (not Shakespeare) with novelization. Or a Radio soap with narrated book. Obviously if you just want narrated text then some system of escaping words with the spoken version works. But now is an actual audio book better than that and simply doing NOTHING to the source text and leaving it up to a best effort speech engine better than CSS speech extensions or SSML rules?
And people not visually impaired now use audio books which was not the case 1899 to 1979.

11-13-2021, 08:15 AM	#7
Quoth Still reading Posts: 14,705 Karma: 109269703 Join Date: Jun 2017 Location: Ireland Device: All 4 Kinds: epub eink, Kindle, android eink, NxtPaper	I was using a text to speech markup on DOS in 1991 for UI of an Ice Cream making machine running on a PC. To save money the audio DAC wasn't a sound card but eight resistors on the parallel port driving a cheap IC amp on one of the custom controiller PCBs. The issue with a book is that a human has to proof read the entire book adding the markup and the CSS route is horribly flawed. There is such a disconnect written & pronounced and so many exceptions to rules that really natural text to speech needs a separate file. Actually English speech isn't quite the same language as written English. Compare a play, TV, film script (not Shakespeare) with novelization. Or a Radio soap with narrated book. Obviously if you just want narrated text then some system of escaping words with the spoken version works. But now is an actual audio book better than that and simply doing NOTHING to the source text and leaving it up to a best effort speech engine better than CSS speech extensions or SSML rules? And people not visually impaired now use audio books which was not the case 1899 to 1979.