Speech voices ignoring period and other punctuation

If you want longer pauses between sentences, copy the text into TextEdit and replace every instance of "." with "..". The only adjustable parameter of the voices is speed.

[[slnc 400]]

Other Embedded Speech Commands can be used to control many aspects of synthetic speech.

I think the point is being missed though...

Text-to-speech should recognize that a comma is a short pause and a period is a longer pause. Rignt now, it ignores periods and pauses for commas.

We shouldn't have to change the text to make up for TTS's deficiencies.

I've found that if the puctuation is not correct it doesn't get recognized as punctuation, for example:

Hello there,have a nice day.And all that. --> wrong

Hello there, have a nice day. And all that. --> correct

The different voices can also act differently when not recognizing punctuation, such as saying "period", or "dot", etc.

I know this is an old thread, but I just started noticing this problem with the "new" (as of Lion) set of voices and using Final Draft. The old voices like Alex are fine, but newer ones like Tom blow right through periods and question marks like one long run-on sentence. Commas and other punctuation is fine, though. Anyone ever find a solution?

I can confirm that the Alex voice when downloaded and selected on the iPhone solves this problem on the iPhone as well. Thanks for the tip!

does anyone have any new information regarding this question? i find it hard to believe that after all this time the problem still isnt resolved. i got an ipad less than a year ago, and i got an iphone a few days ago...new products with fairly new operating systems and still not even a SLIGHT pause for a period! i find it even more bizarre that more people arent talking about this! im not a computer expert but i have to assume it wouldnt be that difficult to tell the voice to pause for periods, since it already pauses for commas.

We are on the right-side of the bell curve regarding Apple's focus on text-to-speech quality, and resource expenditure. Other exigent macOS development, and delivery activity prevails. The present implementation of text-to-speech will not approach the artificial intelligence necessary to humanly interpret, and accurately parse text as you would prefer.

There remain actively developed, Dragon Naturally Speaking, and other commercial products that do a much better job, than the built in solution.

vikingosx - i must be at the perfect level of intoxication because i actually understood this. your post was very helpful - thanks. i will do some research on the other products out there. am i to believe though that pausing for periods is somehow more difficult than pausing for commas, which the speech voices already do? in any case thanks again

[follow-up] strange...i had not tried speech-to-text on my macbook pro - i just did and it works FLAWLESSLY, pausing at periods like it should! weird

my iphone uses 9.3.2

my ipad uses 8.4

my macbook pro uses 10.10.4

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Amen.