I’ve been using Captivate 4 extensively for a week now and I think it’s just a completely different product from previous versions. It’s awesome, while previous versions were just marginally useful to me. Heck, this blog gets hundreds of readers per day and you know why? Because of the Captivate posts. But as I’ve told people for the last 2 years now – I avoided the product for the most part. It was buggy, and just not worth the hassle.
Captivate 4 is awesome. It still has its warts, but considering all the new functionality I’m just amazed at this product and highly recommend it. I’ve now decided that it is going to be my primary elearning development tool. Of course I’ll still use Flash a lot for actual content, I think the packaging/TOC/aggregator features are worthwhile (though they have some serious shortcomings too) and just make the process so much simpler when working with Adobe Connect (or any other LMS I suppose).
Anyways…I plan on posting my opinions on a lot of the new features as I have time. First up: the new text-to-speech feature.
This feature is based on a 3rd-party product and it’s quite easy to use. You simply type in your slide notes (I *believe* that this new ‘text/notes’ area is new to Captivate 4 but I’m not sure) and then click a little button/checkmark next to the text, under the ‘Text to Speech’ column. Really simple. View a screenshot to see:
Captivate 4 Text-to-Speech Feature
It then converts your text to an audio file and adds it to the slide’s timeline, the same as if you recorded your voice into a microphone. No different, except much easier and better sound quality in terms of no noise, good volume level, etc.
There are two voices to choose from: one male voice, “Paul”, and one female, “Kate”.
So….the million-dollar question: do the voices sound like robots?
The male voice does. The female voice, while I haven’t used it much yet, sounds much better. But don’t take my word for it. Listen for yourself:
As you can hear, this guy doesn’t really work too well.
But “Kate” sounds much better:
So, after I’ve bashed “Paul” to smithereens, you probably think I don’t think much of this feature. But in fact I do like it. During development, I usually have to take the time to do a rough, quick voiceover recording for all my slides so I can confirm that my design is ‘flowing’ and my voiceover script is good. I can only tell if I hear it, in synch with the onscreen visuals. So this is a great time-saver in that regard. Hopefully it will prove more useful in future projects.
What do you think? Will you be using this feature? Am I being too picky?
9 Comments
I’ve been playing around with them for the last couple of days and have come to the same conclusions. I LOVE the idea, but I’m just not sure they are ‘real/professional’ enough for what we are looking to provide to our end users.
I agree with Jennifer. Text to Speech is a great feature, I just wish it sounded more professional. I hope Adobe improves this feature in future versions.
Is it possible to adjust the speed at which they read out???????
This is my only problem
The female voice is great
The Neospeech voices are two of the best reasonably priced TTS voices on the market. Loquendo voices are better, but condsiderably more expensive to license. For pronounciations look in the directory the voices were loaded into, I beleive there is a dictionary app to add custom words, etc. Also, these are used with the VoiceText TTS engine, and can be further controlled using their proprietary vtml scripting language for pauses, pitch, speed changing etc. We use TTS for prototyping and beta testing prior to final recording to save on the costs of re-takes by professional narrators which can slide schedules and be quite pricey on larger projects.
If you do a search online for vt_eng-Engine-VTML-v3.9.0-3.pdf this ddocument will give you all the vtml tags you can add to your text to further control your voices. But I dod think Captivate 4 is a huge improvement from previous versions, and I too may be switching to this as my primary development tool.
Anyone knows if are there other voices? In other languages for example?
And… I guess that work captivate with loquendo voices is not able, is it?
Can you help me, please?
Thanks
Daniel,
A workaround might be possible but I would think to attempt it you’d have to purchase voices from the original vendor and there’s no guarantee they’ll work. Your best bet might be to just purchase whatever text-to-speech tool/voices you want, separately from Captivate, and then do your recording/conversion and export as individual audio files per slide and then import into Captivate.
But I gotta ask – are these electronic voices really worth the hassle? I would just use straight text over these voices as they just get to be distracting really quick because, let’s face it, the voices are great for short bursts but you won’t be convincing anyone that they’re real and that gets distracting to learners. I think we’re still a few years away from having this luxury of text-to-speech really be worthwhile for anything other than use during alphas/prototypes, as previously discussed.
My 2 cents…
mark
Thanks for your reply Mark!
I’m completely agree with your opinion about TTS. We just use it sometimes in a short sentences when the clients ask us about, normally looking for web accessibility.
Talking about the way to add locutions, I used to do it separately from captivate in last versions (using loquendo). However I discovered this new feature in CP4 and I saw it so easy to use. It’s just this the reason of my questions!
Thanks again!
thanks for this post. I have been using captivate for more than 3 weeks, and was not aware of this feature.
This could be a really useful tool for me as I create videos for youtube, but I hate recording my voice…too many retakes, either because I mess up or just sound crap. I think I’ll give the female voice ago. Thanks for the info I’ll tweet this to my followers.
Rob