Making speech sound better

    You can make the computer's speech sound more natural by embedding punctuation and commands in speakable text files. Punctuation and commands control pauses, emphasis, and other speech elements.

    You can try these techniques in SimpleText or any application that uses speech.

    Open SimpleText for me.

    Note: This section describes just two of the many commands available to control speech. For a list of examples using other commands, see "Speech Manager," Chapter 4 of "Inside Macintosh."

Inserting pauses

    Commas insert brief pauses in speech. You use commas in speech text far more frequently than you do when you write regular sentences. For example, the following text-to-speech sentence has two commas where a regular sentence would have none:

    "You have a meeting, next Monday at 3:30, in room 57."

    The longer the sentence, the more important it becomes to insert pauses.

    To add pauses to a spoken line:
    • Insert a comma where you want a pause to occur:
    "Five files and three folders, have been copied to the external drive."

    Pauses are particularly helpful after groups of words, filenames made up of several words, or email addresses.

    To add shorter pauses before and after a phrase:
    • Put single quotation marks around the phrase:
    "The file 'status report' has been printed."

Removing unneeded emphasis

    When speaking, the computer tends to emphasize too many words, making it difficult to tell which words and phrases are important.

    To remove emphasis from a word:
    • Precede the word with the command [[emph -]]:
    "Five [[emph -]] documents were printed, and three were [[emph -]] copied to backup."

    Here are some common words from which emphasis should be removed:
    • Last noun in a phrase when that noun is modified by one or more preceding words:
    "chocolate [[emph -]] cake."
    "printer [[emph -]] paper."
    "disk [[emph -]] drive."
    "telephone [[emph -]] call."
    "backup [[emph -]] disk."
    • Words that refer to something already mentioned or easily inferred, such as words that are repeated in the same sentence or in a previous sentence:
    "You have five old [[emph -]] messages,
    and three new [[emph -]] messages."
    • Words that are included in the name of the command item:
    For example, a speakable command called "Count mounted volumes":
    "There are five [[emph -]] mounted [[emph -]] volumes."

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