Text to speech problem. Bug or Error?

If it makes a difference, my app is free and I made it because I need to use a text to speech app due to a disease. I learned to code because I needed this app. I usually see about 1500 uses of my app weekly, so others find it helpful.


On iOS 9 I dont have this problem, but ever sice Beta 1 of iOS 10 I do. In my app, the user can select from multiple languages and voices. The problem is only present when the English Alex voice is selected. If I select the Alex voice as my text to speech voice, just prior to saying the desired text, with the default Siri voice, it will say, "S L N C Twenty" and then in the Alex voice the text. This problem occurs with the existing iOS 9 build from Xcode 7 and a new build from the beta of Xcode 8. I have no warnings or errors in Xcode when I build my app.


The code is really simple and not much to it. I get the text from the user and the language/voice they select and just tell the synthesizer to play the phrase.

BTW, I use Objective C.

[self.synthesizer speakUtterance:self.utterance];


I dont know if this is a bug or I need to change something in my code. I'm not sure what I can provide here to help.


Any ideas or comments will be appreciated.

I'm doing a lot of speech synth work in Beta 4 and I haven't heard that behavior with the Alex voice or any others. My app is Swift, however. Have you made sure your text-to-speak is a clean string?

Yes, clean string. If I change to any other voice, it works fine. Just not with Alex.

Yeah not a bug. I made a simple test app and it works fine, selecting the Alex voice. I can't figure out where my problem is. No matter what text is typed, the same phrase is spoken in the default language prior to saying the phrase in the Alex voice. I just wonder what does "S L N C 20" mean and what could be causing that??

Have you tried logging the speech utterance string in the console?

NSLog(@"%@", self.utterance.speechString);

Ok, thanks for your suggestions and help. It turns out it is a bug, which I will report. If there is a preUtteranceDelay, that will cause the error with the Alex voice. In my code I had the following:


self.utterance.preUtteranceDelay = 0.02;


As soon as I silenced that line, the error disappeared. All the other languages / voices were not affected.

Text to speech problem. Bug or Error?
 
 
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