Adobe Captivate: Train the Text to Speech Agents

by Kevin Siegel

During my beginner Captivate classes, I always teach students how to use Captivate's Text to Speech feature. I always look forward to teaching that particular feature because it honestly gets everyone in the room pumped up. And why not? Text to Speech is an easy-to-use utility that will instantly convert written text into audio files. All you have to do is type a slide note, select the note, click Text-to-Speech, select a "speech agent," and click Generate Audio.

If you've spent any time with Captivate's Text to Speech utility, you have probably discovered that the pronunciation of the spoken words isn't always perfect. Unfortunately, if you don't like it, there isn't a pronunciation editor in Captivate that will help, so you're stuck. Bummer! The end! Have a nice day.

Oh, you were looking for solutions here? In that case, read on.

Believe it or not, there is actually a pronunciation editor for the Text to Speech utility, but it's not part of the Captivate interface and you aren't likely to stumble upon it accidentally.

If you have installed Captivate and the Text to Speech Utility, you'll typically find the tool in the following location:

• Program [Captivate Installation Folder]\VT\Kate or Paul (depending on the agent you selected when you recorded)\M16\bin

There is an application hiding in the BIN folder called UserDicEng.exe.



Open UserDicENG.exe and the English User Dictionary Editor will open.

To change the pronunciation of a particular word:

1. Open the userdict_eng.csv dictionary file
   
   (Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 4\VT\agent\M16\data-common\userdict\)
   
   
2. Click Add word
   
   
3. Type the original word into the Source field
   
   
4. Type the correct word into the Target field using the correct pronunciation (using the letters or the Pronunciation Symbols)
   
   You can always click Read to hear the pronunciation of the new, target word.
   
   
   
   
5. Click OK
   
   
6. When satisfied, click the File Save button
   
   
7. Click the Close button
   
   The new pronunciation will be used by your Speech Agent within Captivate the next time you convert text to speech.

Comments

[wheat]

There's a weird bug in Cp4 where both Paul and Kate use Kate's pronunciation library. I encountered it recently on a large project that uses text-to-speech for all the voice overs. It was consistent (and others on the Adobe Captivate Forums) have noticed it. Just an FYI. So long as you select Kate's dictionary for editing, all is well.