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<title>Tell It Like It Is: Text-to-Speech (TTS)</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" media="speech" href="css/synth.css" />
<link rel="pronunciation" href="lexicon/en.pls" type="application/pls+xml" hreflang="en" />
<link rel="pronunciation" href="lexicon/fr.pls" type="application/pls+xml" hreflang="fr" />
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<p data-origPath="/html/body/section/p[8]">The result is that most reading systems with built-in synthetic speech capabilities
will do a decent job with the most common words in any language, but can trip over
themselves when trying to pronounce complex compound words, technical terms, proper
names, abbreviations, numbers, and the like. Heteronyms—words that are spelled the
same way but have different pronunciations and meanings—also offer a challenge, as
you can’t always be sure which pronunciation will come out. The word <em>bass</em>
in English, for example, is pronounced one way to indicate a fish (bass) and another
to indicate an instrument (base).</p>
<p data-origPath="/html/body/section/p[9]">When you add up the various problem areas, it’s not a surprise why there’s a high
frequency of errors. These failings are especially problematic in educational,
science, medical, legal, tax, and similar technical publishing fields, as you might
expect, as the proper pronunciation of terms is critical to comprehension and being
able to communicate with peers.</p>
<p data-origPath="/html/body/section/p[10]">The ability to correctly voice individual words is a huge benefit to all readers, in
other words, which is why you should care about the synthetic rendering quality of
your ebooks, as I said I’d get back to. Even if all your readers aren’t going to
read your whole book via synthetic speech, everyone comes across words they aren’t
sure how to pronounce, weird-looking character names, etc. In the print world,
they’d just have to guess at the pronunciation and live with the nuisance of
wondering for the rest of the book whether they have the it right in their head or
not (barring the rare pronunciation guide in the back, of course).</p>
<p data-origPath="/html/body/section/p[11]">The embedded dictionaries and pronunciations that reading systems offer are a step up
from print, but typically are of little-to-no help in many of these cases, since
specialized terms and names don’t appear in general dictionaries. Enhancing your
ebooks even just to cover the most complicated names and terms goes a long way to
making the entire experience better for all. Enhanced synthetic speech capabilities
are a great value-add to set you apart from the crowd, especially if you’re
targeting broad audience groups.</p>
<p data-origPath="/html/body/section/p[12]">Synthetic speech can also reduce the cost to produce audio-enhanced ebooks. Human
narration is costly, as I mentioned at the outset, and typically only practical for
novels, general non-fiction, and the like. But even in those kinds of books, are you
going to have a person narrate the bibliographies and indexes and other complex
structures in the back matter, or would it make more sense to leave them to the
reader’s device to voice? Having the pronunciation of words consistent across the
human-machine divide takes on a little more importance in this light, unless you
want to irk your readers with rotten sounding back matter (or worse, omitted
material).</p>
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