Text to Speech Hints and Tips for Adobe Captivate

hi guys paul wilson here uh today's video i'm going to talk a little bit about the text to speech technology that's built into adobe captivate eight um i've been using adobe captivate since about version two and i've been using the text-to-speech technology since about version five or so i think it's i think it was five anyway um regardless of what you think of the technology it is actually quite beneficial to become somewhat familiar with it even if your intention is to re-record the audio with a professional voice talent in a professional recording studio it's probably good to have the text-to-speech stuff as a temp track so what i'm going to attempt to teach you today is how best to use it so that you've got a fairly natural sounding narration throughout your course so to access the text-to-speech technology in adobe captivating it's a separate install when you go to attempt to run the text-to-speech technology if it's not already installed it will provide you a link to download that and you can do so and then run that executable file to install everything once you've done that you can access the text-to-speech technology through the window drop-down by going into the slide notes tab which i can open up by either selecting it from here or simply clicking or tapping uh control alt n if you're a shortcut key person so i'll just bring it up here and you'll see there's a button called text to speech there and i can press that button and i can choose from one of many different speech agents speech agents are simply voices that are available to you and they can all be accessed from the speech management window that you see here so i generally use julie i find that out of all the voices at least the north american voices anyway she's the most natural sounding i'll leave it up to you to experiment with which voice you think is better or best or most appropriate for your e-learning but i'm going to stick with julie for this demonstration and all that really is required is that you need to type in what it is that you want julie to say so i'm just going to come up with something very simple here you can copy and paste your narration into this window or you can type it as i'm doing now hello my name is julie and i'm a speech agent in adobe captivate eight very simple sentence to to generate that we simply go down to generate audio which i've just clicked and we can close that window you'll see that information in the slide notes and actually if you bring up the timeline by using window let me just show that again and selecting timeline or control alt t again for you shortcut folks out there you will see that actually there is a text to audio item across the bottom of your timeline if your slide is shorter than the narration takes to speech it will automatically push the length of that slide out appropriately mine was already set at about nine and a half seconds but i can resize it if need be let's preview what that sounds like so we can get an idea of the quality hello my name is julie and i'm a speech agent in adobe captivate eight okay well it's all right it's a little robotic what i can show you now is something sort of a hint or tip if you will on how to improve this there's a couple things you can do let's go back to slide notes and i'm going to copy this stuff because i'm going to need it in a second here now when you install the speech agents for adobe captivate it's actually installing a software application called voice text from a company called neospeech now it's only installing it in sort of a trial in kind of a hidden mode but you can still access it and use some of its functionality so let's click on the start button i'll show you where you can find it we're going to click on my computer and then we're going to go to my c drive now depending on which version of adobe captivate you're running whether you're running the 32-bit version or the 64-bit version you'll find it in one of two locations if you're like me and using the 64-bit version you'll find it in the program files folder if you're using the 32-bit version you'll find it in the x86 version of that folder i'm going to click here for now and we're looking for a folder called adobe captivate voices 8 x64 in my case i'm going to go in there and you'll see a folder called vt that's short for voice text and then you'll see a list of all the different speech agents that have been installed on your computer in this case we're looking for julie so we're going to use her and click that folder you'll see a folder called m16 we'll double click on that and then you'll see a folder called bin or short for binary i'm guessing the program itself will double click on that folder and then we're looking for an application called vt editor underscore english now this is like a text editor for text to speech will open this up and i'll show you a little bit about that now it looks very much like notepad in a lot of respects i'll just resize this a little bit here and i can simply paste in the text that i'm working with but the great thing about this tool is that i can do certain things to the text now one of the things i noticed is that there weren't really any natural sounding pauses in julie's voice now this can be accomplished by putting in commas at key points but you can also do it another way as well you can actually use so for example we want her to say hello and then pause so we're going to insert a pause we use that the edit tool for that the edit drop down menu and we can put a pause and it can be a length of time in milliseconds well i don't really know how many milliseconds a comma is so i'm going to use the break function very similar to pause but pause of 2 is very similar to a comma a positive 1 is when two words kind of run together but you want to make sure that they are very distinctly spoken and a positive 0 is no impact at all i'm not even sure why it's an option in this case here i'm going to use a pause of two and so it will sound like hello break my name is julie and i'm a speech agent so i'm going to put another pause here break of 2 and i'm going to put a small pause that little you know tiny pause between agent in adobe captivate almost as if i'm trying to simulate julie taking a simple breath so we'll just do this break level of one and that's pretty good now i'm going to highlight all this text because i found that she was speaking kind of slow and i want to change how fast this is going to be spoken so again i'm going to use the edit drop down menu and i'm going to select speed now speed is measured in percent so the default in other words no syntax on the on the narration is 100 percent so i can either slow it down to 90 95 or speed it up to 105 110 and 115. of course you can edit these numbers after the fact so don't worry too much about which one you select i'm going to choose 105 because i found that's worked well for me before and what what's happened here i know it's a little confusing to see let me add some carriage returns here just so you can see clearly what's happened so it's added a little bit of code before and after the previous statement here so there's a speed value indicated in this code here of 105. again like i said you could change this to let's say 104 or anything you want really and then of course there's a closing statement at the end here to let it know that it's finished with that change in speed so i have some pretty neat uh stuff here let's do a little preview right now you can preview it by hitting the read button now again because this is not really a complete install of the voice text software you're going to hear a little message where it's warning you to use the software you must purchase it but again we're not using it to generate the files that you actually need we're just using it for that punctuation and syntax that's appropriate for this code let's preview it anyway this version is strictly for demonstration purposes only hello my name is julie and i'm a speech agent in adobe captivate 8. see how much more natural that sounds i'm very happy with this so i'm going to copy all this text here and i'm going to return to adobe captivate 8 where i can now click the text to speech button open the speech management window and i can select all that text i previously had and paste in the new text with all the additional syntax now if i hit the generate audio button that syntax is now converted into an audio file that we can then use so i'm going to close this and we'll preview it once more by going to the timeline and then just hitting the play button here hello my name is julie and i'm a speech agent in adobe captivate eight so it's not perfect but it's certainly a lot better than just simply cutting and pasting in the regular narration this way you can massage the narration a little bit have it sound a little bit more natural and in those cases where maybe you can't afford a a professional voice talent and a professional recording studio this is a really great alternative one of the things i'll include for you as well down in the uh the the description of this video is i'll include a hyperlink to a document that is provided actually by neospeech on the vtml voice text markup language and this will include directions on not only the syntax i've already covered but additional syntax as well one of the other ones that i'd like to point out is parts of speech parts of speech is really useful when you encounter words where these the text-to-speech agent is not pronouncing the word properly an example could be record versus record exactly the same word one's a noun one's a verb so you need to specify that and you can use the syntax found in parts of speech here i'll leave that to you to take care of and of course as always if you found these videos useful i would really appreciate if you subscribe by hitting the subscribe button that you'll find below the video and once again thanks very much

Channel: Paul Wilson's eLearning Tutorials

Views: 71,320

Keywords: authoring software, captivate audio, e-learning authoring, neospeech, adobe captivate 2019 tutorials for beginners, closed captions, captivate, audio, slide audio, vtml, text-to-speech, Cpativate, elearning authoring tool, elearning authoring software, adobe captivate, cbt, Text to Speech Hints and Tips for Adobe Captivate, captivate 8, elearning, narration, captivate projects, text to speech, elearning audio, elearning development, adobe captivate 8, learning, e-learning authoring tool

Id: kl1aEC3zso8

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 26 2014