Ignore Characters for Speech

I would love the ability to specify certain characters that are ignored by the Speech engine when I use captioning and Text to Speech - it doesn’t read “comma” when it encounters a comma, but it does read other characters that I don’t want it to read.

As an example, I want to display this caption, since it best explains to my users what I need them to do:

Hold down the Control Key on your keyboard, click the “Downloads”, “Favorites”, “My Documents”, “My Pictures”, and “My Videos” folders.

When the Text to Speech engine reads the text, it reads characters I’d like it to ignore:

Hold down the Control Key on your keyboard, click the end-quote Downloads end-quote end-quote Favorites end-quote end-quote My Documents end-quote end-quote My Pictures end-quote and end-quote My Videos end-quote folders.

If I could just tell ActivePresenter to not speak quote marks ("), hyphens (-), single quotes (’) and other characters that are typically used in text, but not in speech, that would be really helpful.

The single quote one is particularly challenging if you use English language contractions like we’re, you’re, they’re, etc.

As an example:

We’re going to the zoo.

When rendered by the speech engine, it reads:
We End-Apos re going to the zoo.

Thanks,

Russell

Hi,

It looks like a bug in ActivePresenter. We will check and try to fix it in the future updates.

Regards,

Excellent. Thank you!

Russell

Hi Russell,

It is strange that we could not reproduce the problem in our tests. Can you please let us know:

  • The Text To Speech voice that you used for generating audio?
  • The version of Windows.

Regards,

Hi,

I’m using Active Presenter Version 7.1.0 (Released 2018.02012).
The Text to Speech voice I am using is: Microsoft Zira Desktop - English (United States)
Windows Version: Windows 10 Enterprise - Version 1703 - OS Build 15063.909.

Let me know if I can provide other details that might assist you.

Thanks,

Russell

Hi,

We have also tested on this platform but it still works well. I guess some changes in Windows settings is the cause of issue. Can you please show us the below screen on your computer (click Windows icon on taskbar, type regedit, then go to the key Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech\Voices\Tokens\TTS_MS_EN-US_ZIRA_11.0\Attributes):

Regards,

Thanks for taking a look at this. We appear to have the same settings:

Let me know if there’s anything else I can provide to assist you.

Thanks,

Russell

It seems to be a PC-specific issue and we don’t know how to resolve it now. If you have other PCs, please check to see whether it works?

Regards.