RussP wrote:I've also been looking for a way to turn it off, but haven't found one, as such. However, if you set up lexicon entries, or use the <phoneme> tag, you should be able to make it pronounce it as "jan" instead of "january". See
http://www.cepstral.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12
The official response from Cepstral was:
Cepstral Support wrote:Swift itself does not expand abbreviated words. These pronunciations are in the voice's internal lexicon, to which the end user has no access. Therefore there is no other way to circumvent expansion when using Cepstral voices other than the correct manner which was previously pointed out with the link above. There are many instances in the English language where conflicting pronunciations, whether through abbreviations, heteronyms, punctuation, etc., present issues for TTS synthesis. In that light, pronunciation choices for our internal lexicons were made based on the highest probability of occurence and possible usage. Unfortunately, Jan's name did not rank as high as the abbreviation for the month of January. This is why we created our "userlex" as a tool for the end user to make adjustments. This tool, while very useful in making our voices even more robust and dynamic still does not solve all issues. These are instances which vividly point out the complexity of the English language and its use in TTS Synthesis.
In the case of heteronyms that's fine but, in my opinion, expanding abbreviations is wrong. If I wanted it to say January I'd have told it to say January. Since the internal lexicon doesn't appear to have a publicly available word list I've decided that Cepstral isn't the voice engine for us and we're looking for alternatives.
Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2007 12:31 pm