During every Captivate beginner class, time is spent on the second day teaching everyone how to use Captivate's Text-to-Speech feature to convert slide notes into speech.
Recently, one of my students asked an excellent question: "I'd love it if there was a pain-free way to quickly change the agent from Kate, to Paul to Chloe, and then maybe back to Kate. As it stands, I need to select each slide note in the Speech Management dialog box, one at a time and then change the agent. It would help I, at the very least, I can select all of a slide's notes at once and change the agent. Is this possible?"
The answer is yes, you can select multiple slide notes and change agents on the fly (not multiple slides, but multiple notes). The solution, while easy, isn't obvious. Here's how:
First, go through your project and convert the slide notes to speech. If you're not sure how, review this article.
After you've committed to an agent, changing your mind is just as easy as selecting the original agent. Choose Audio > Speech Management to open the Speech Management dialog box.
In the image below, notice that different agents have been used between the two slides.
Next, select all of the notes for the slide. While this sounds simple, you'll need to carefully click in the space just above each note to successfully select the note.
From the Speech Agent drop-down menu, select an agent. In the images below, both slide notes are selected for Slide 2 and Chloe is being selected from the Speech Agent drop-down menu. (Note: While you can select multiple slide notes, you can only select the notes for one slide at a time; you'll need to repeat this process for each slide.)
The final step is to simply click the Generate Audio button at the bottom of the dialog box and you're all set.
If you'd like to see a demonstration of swapping one Speech Agent with another, check out the video I created on the IconLogic YouTube channel.
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