The text-to-speech feature in Captivate 4 comes from a company called Neospeech. The feature is compatible with VTML(VoiceText Markup Language), which you can use to make the voices sound more natural.
Information about the VTML language can be found here in this PDF: http://www.neospeech.com/manual/vt_kor-Engine-API-References-v3.7.0%20(english_translation).pdf
If you go to Appendix C: VTML Tagset you will see some commands that you can use directly in the text in Captivate. Once you convert your text to speech, these tags will be interpreted by the Neospeech engine.
Update: English manual for version 3.9 can be found here: https://ondemand.neospeech.com/vt_eng-Engine-VTML-v3.9.0-3.pdf
A couple of examples:
<vtml_break level=”0″ | “1” | “2”/>
<vtml_pause time=”msec”/>
<vtml_pitch>
9 Comments
I looked over the doc and it is useless as it looks like it is just the C API. Unless you have a way of compiling the swf along with the C code/includes that the NeoText people provide, then it is useless.
mark
http://www.elearninglive.com
Hi Mark,
If you go to Appendix C: VTML Tagset, you will find commands that you can use directly in the text in Captivate. These tags will be interpreted by the Neospeech engine when you convert your text to speech in Captivate.
/Michael
It appears that the reference for the VTML Tag Set can be found here: VTML Tag Set User’s Guide
Has anyone tried the tag? I tried to use it to get the TTS voice to say “presents” (the verb, as in “The Learning Series presents this tutorial”) rather than “presents” (as in “Christmas presents”) but it didn’t work.
The tag name got stripped out: I meant the vtml_partofsp tag.
Has anyone tried to use the vtml_phoneme command. I’m trying to get the NeoSpeech to pronounce the word “initiative” correctly and I’m having no luck.
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Hi, Michael,
I want to convert a captions into voice. I want the voice for each line to start at the designated time. e.g. at 0:00:02 the system reads out “Hello! World!”, at 0:00:15 the system reads out “Nice to meet you!”. Can you tell me the tag for this timing thing?
Thank you!
Jeff
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