If you don't mind, in stead of keeping arguing whether the synths exhibit the mentioned pitch-lowering, why don't we give it a try. Below, you will find a rather long sample phrase, which definitely will show you the pitch-lowering with Eloquence - and which samplifies what Doug was talking about. Can't speak for the Dectalk synth, as I don't have access to it.
Regards, This is a test of the speech from the Window-Eyes screen reader and the Eloquence Reed voice to see if it will keep going on forever and ever in lowering the pitch as it reads this one long phrase where there is no punctuation whatsoever and therefore the speech will not know when to catch its breath so it will keep chattering all the time till you hit a punctuation mark and then it finally will go back to its normal pitch and keep going from there way until you hit a new long phrase with no punctuation to break the line of words into smaller pieces so as for the speech to know where the pauses should be properly made in the stream of text that is send to the synthesizer in one turn around that is in one long continious stream of characters like letters digits and symbols of different kinds and maybe now it is time for Eloquence to take a moment to breathe before he can start out reading the next line of information to you in a proper manner poor guy. ----- Original Message ----- From: Doug Geoffray To: Sunshine ; David Plumlee ; [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2013 3:23 PM Subject: Re: An Annoying Voice Problem, Eloquence. flips pitches The pitch changing is a bug (although Nuance calls it a feature). It will do this if there is no punctuation in the text you are reading. So if you are reading a list of things and there is no period or comma in the text Eloquence will just keep going lower and lower. Once it gets to normal textual punctuation it takes a deep breath and goes back to normal. I complained about this and Nuance said this was by design... I could never get them to realize this is not a good thing. But all this is moot anyway as no development will ever be done on eloquence anymore...at least as long as Nuance owns it. Doug On 10/22/2013 8:37 PM, Sunshine wrote: I also have a thing that is a bit bothersom. When doing a read all the same synth will start reading correctly but after a while it keeps going down in pitch and then resumes the correct pitch why is this and what can be done to fix it? ----- Original Message ----- From: David Plumlee To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2013 6:59 PM Subject: An Annoying Voice Problem I am running Windows XP with SP3, and I have the latest version of WE using Eloquence. My complaint is that the voice "flips" back and forth between the main speech voice and the one for the mouse. This annoying "flipping" happens when reading web pages and often when reading E-Mail messages. True, the speech is always understandable; but I wish I could reliably "lock it" on the main eloquence voice on everything except the speech from the mouse emulation. I don't need the keyboard voice to be different, since I know with absolute certainty when I am typing on the keyboard. Any ideas will be appreciated. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. You can manage your list subscription at http://www.gwmicro.com/listserv.
