Chip,
Likely you are already aware of this. Still, here goes.
My best solution, in cases where I want a pause in a spoken phrase, is to
break it into several phrases. Unfortunately, the way Window-Eyes stands
today, I haven't found any way of controlling how long that pause will be,
but at least, there will be a pause at the point of a new phrase. So, the
phrase 'he was eating his supper, late in the evening', will be like this:
Speak "He was eating his supper"
Speak "late in the evening"
I did try, in one of my apps, to put a Sleep command between the two speak
lines, but all I got, was that the speech would do both the phrases, and
then the script would 'sleep' for the given time. OK, I only have tested
this with Eloquence, so can't speak for any other synth. But I do know, that
TextAloud - from Nextup.com - does give you the full control to put pauses
of several seconds between two phrases, meaning that there should be chance
of doing so; only that Window-Eyes might not open up for that kind of
control of the synths.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Allison and Chip Orange" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, August 07, 2011 2:23 AM
Subject: causing pauses in speech
Hi all,
I'm looking for a technique which will cause pauses in a long string of
speech. It will be in a situation where it's very likely all the
punctuation will be enabled, so simply placing some punctuation in the
string isn't likely to help, just cause more to listen to.
my only thought, was to turn off all the punctuation, add punctuation to
the
string (maybe just a comma between parts will be enough, my experiments
seem
to show that anything else, or more than one doesn't do any better), speak
the string, and then turn back on punctuation.
The trouble with this approach is the timing; if something else is
speaking
when I do this, it will lose it's punctuation; if something is speaking
afterwards, it may not have it's punctuation.
luckily, I'm doing this as a result of a hot key, so maybe the timing
isn't
as much of an issue, I'm just not sure.
anyway, does anyone have any thoughts or any better technique?
thanks.
Chip
