Need help with text-to-speech engine

Thanks. I agree that it seems to work better than anything else I've tried, even with the voice I use (Ava). To be honest, I can't figure out why they work since your speech commands don't seem to be working the way I'd expect them to from the documentation -- they seem to be applying to the *previous* word, not to what follows, as I had understood them to work. I'll have to play with it see better what's going on. In particular, it seems very strange that [[emph -]] is what you use to create emphasis, not [[emph +]]!

And you didn't use [[emph +]] at all! Do you know if anyone has ever written up a truly useful guide to the speech commands, especially indicating what works with which voices? The developer's "Speech Synthesis Programming Guide" from 2006, which seems to be the most recent version I can find, is not particularly helpful.

OK, I did some more experimenting, both with Ava and Susan. I need to take the "helpful" off! The only commands that had any affect on the speech were the [[slnc 125]]. I took all the other commands (emph, rate, pmos, pmod) out and that made no difference. I had it pronounce the two sentences right after each other -- with and without any commands except [[slnc 125]] and couldn't hear any difference. It was breaking "content" into two words --- "con tent" -- that made the first "content" sound a little better, and the two 125ms delays made the words before them ("I" and "you") seem to have been emphasized, but they weren't really. It didn't matter whether I used Susan or Ava. I'd go back to the drawing board, but I think it isn't taking any ink at all. I am willing to assert that the only useful command that works any more is [[slnc ...]]. The manual has some examples of the phonetic spelling command that works for some voices (like Alex) but not others (neither Susan nor Ava.) The manual also has examples of [[emph +]] that don't work with Alex either.

That does seem to be what I'm finding out and what the general consensus is. What a shame -- older is better than newer. Sure, on the whole the newer voices do a much better job than the older ones, but that just makes the places they fail all that more obvious! With all the work that I imagine it takes to produce a "voice" you'd think they could do just a little more so as to add a few of the simple embedded speech commands. If emphasis, phonetics (with stress), and possibly volume were available, that it would make it so much better. Oh, and being able to switch voices on the fly (not one of the original speech commands, I believe) would be super. One can only dream...

Thanks for responding, but I'd already seen that thread, which just confirms what we've been talking about here -- except for the ability to introduce silence, the embedded speech commands basically don't work any more, except possibly for the "original" voices. Maybe I should ask this as a separate question, but how do we go about getting a definitive answer from Apple, rather than speculation amongst us users?

Where would I ask the question such that it might get an answer? As best I can tell, Apple doesn't generally join in on the discussions in "Apple Support Communities." I would assume if that I were an official Apple developer I'd have an official channel for asking questions, but I'm not, just an ordinary customer.