Comments on: Capivate 4 Text-to-Speech Feature Review

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:30:41 +0000

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

By: Accounting Teacher

Accounting Teacher — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:07:33 +0000

thanks for this post. I have been using captivate for more than 3 weeks, and was not aware of this feature.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:49:29 +0000

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!

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:33:11 +0000

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

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:57:20 +0000

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

By: Kurt

Kurt — Thu, 21 May 2009 02:07:43 +0000

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.

By: moses

moses — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:55:07 +0000

Is it possible to adjust the speed at which they read out???????
This is my only problem

The female voice is great

By: Hilary

Hilary — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:40:10 +0000

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.

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:23:33 +0000

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.