Using Captivate's Text to Speech feature allows you to quickly convert written text to voiceover audio. It's an awesome feature. However, we recently had a client who felt that Paul (that was the Speech Agent we used for the project) spoke too fast. The client wanted to know if we cloud slow him down a bit.
While you might think that controlling the cadence used by the Speech Agent was beyond your control, it's actually really easy. Prior to converting a slide note to speech, just add a bit of code (known as Voice Text Markup Language or VTML) to the text.




Click the Text to Speech button and regenerate the audio (the existing audio will be replaced with the new audio file). You'll find that the agent's speed has been cut in half (thanks to the 50 you added as part of the VTML code). You can experiment with the speed values until you find a speed that works best for you and/or your client.
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Check out my video where I go into a little more detail about Voice Text Markup Language (VTML). It should help with this and other types of things you can do to control text-to-speech technology.
https://youtu.be/kl1aEC3zso8
Posted by: PaulWilsonTrain | March 27, 2015 at 10:10 PM
Hi Kevin,
I am generating TTS from Slide Notes in Captivate 8, however I am having some speed and pronunciation issues. I would love to use VTML however, I need to also use Closed Captioning. Whenever I change the slide notes text, this is of course what appears as my CC. Is there any way to accomplish adjusting the TTS in Slide Notes without affecting the CC?
Thanks.
Posted by: Shannon | September 16, 2015 at 04:30 PM