Hi David,
I absolutely agree with you about the need for this. I've tried to add it to a couple of my apps, but not had a lot of luck, because the WE object model just doesn't support this idea. It does support it just a little, in that the second parameter of the speak method allows you to specify whether it should be spoken in the screen, mouse, or keyboard voice settings. This requires the user to go and alter these voice settings (which they may not want to do), and the only thing it allows you to change is the basic pitch or tone of the synthesizer in use, but you cannot use more than one synthesizer concurrently. So, I tried to do this in my apps without requiring the user to alter the keyboard, mouse, or screen voices, and even without changing synthes I ran into the problem Jim brings up: there's some delay introduced even when staying with the same synthesizer. If you try to change synthesizers the delay is intolerable. If you stay with the same synth, and you want this just to happen automatically without requiring the user to go alter their basic 3 voice settings, it's very difficult to determine which changes to speech parameters will actually produce a noticib le change in the sound of the voice. You can look at my app named Word Advanced Features for some code where I try to deal with this automatically, but I've come to believe it may be better just to ask the user to dedicate one of the mouse or keyboard voices to this function, and then ask them to make the changes they wish, so that they will be able to notice the difference in voice sound. Hth, Chip From: David [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, January 17, 2014 7:56 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Using a secondary voice for speech messages Allright, you developers, Here is another tricky question. Hope someone has a solution, as it would have improved my projects a bit. Le'ts for samplification say, that a user is operating his computer by Eloquence Reed. Like many users actually are doing. My app sends a few messages to the synthesizer, like status messages in given operations, or resulting messages from other operations. Since they are all sent to the same synth, it is likely it only will drown in the amount of other activity the user is performing. And, he may not be able to discern what the message is about. This could specially be the case, when an app is performing some activity in the background, or in a separate window, and the user currently is reading a document. Now, if the status message from the app pops in, right in the middle of the document reading, either the user will think it may be part of the document, or he may experience a break-down of the speech altogether. It would have many benefits, if the app could have its "internal" messages sent to another voice, available on the user's system. Now, with the Speak command, in WE, is there a way to redirect the output to a secondary synth or voice? Or, is there a "back-door" workaround to this issue? I greatly would welcome any ideas you all may have, and maybe you have implied any such solution in your apps already, and could please share some techniques? Thanks alot,
