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Techniques for Customizing Synthesized Speech

This chapter describes how to fine-tune the speech your application generates. It provides guidelines for using speech synthesis APIs and embedded speech commands and it includes a number of examples of specific tasks. This chapter also describes several ways you can improve your application’s spoken output. If you need fine-grained control over the generated speech in your application, you should read this chapter to learn how to take advantage of the advanced features of the Speech Synthesis framework.

Some of the advanced techniques described in this chapter are supported only by the Carbon speech synthesis API, although any application that has access to the Application Services framework can use them. If you haven’t decided which API to use, you should read “Carbon and Cocoa Speech Synthesis APIs Compared” to find out which API supports the level of customization you want to implement. Other techniques described in this chapter involve the use of embedded speech commands and other text modifiers, which are available to all applications.

Contents:

Adjust Speech Channel Settings Using the Carbon Speech Synthesis API
Use Embedded Speech Commands to Fine-Tune Spoken Output
Use Phoneme Modifiers to Adjust Pronunciation
Use Punctuation Correctly
Use the TUNE Format to Supply Complex Pitch Contours
Synchronize Speech with Application-Specific Actions
Avoid Cross-Talk
Four Ways to Improve Spoken Output

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