"LORD's" and "selah" is pronounced wrongly by Ivonavoice

[agrogers]

I think this is an easy one to fix but it is trivial and so no important. I really like Ivona Voice - not sure if other Text to Voice systems have the same problem.

"LORD's". (example Gen 44.8 works fine; Lev 2.3 is bad) This is pronounced "Lord Ez". I assume this is because of the change to show the name of the Lord in Small Caps. So the voice software disconnects the letters 'Lord' from the letters apostrophe and 'S'.

"Selah". (example: ESV Psalm 3.2) This is pronounced correctly but ironically there is NO pause at all after it. Selah is suppose to mean pause and think about what has been said. However because there is no fullstop after 'selah' in the ESV version on AndBible it merges 'selah' with the first word of the next sentence.

Possible solution: I would think that all that is required is to send the text to a parse function (I suspect that is already happening) that would make some slight adjustments to the text. For example, it would change the unconventional capitalization to normal capitalization. And it would add a full-stop or even better a long pause after 'selah' if it didn't have one.

I have been finding the Speak option in AndBible excellent. Ivona voice is good enough for me to forget that it is a computer speaking. I use the Aussie voice. Highly recommend it.

[mjdenham]

There are a whole load of mispronunciations. The one I find most annoying is Ark which TTS assumes is an abbreviation for Arkansas. That happens with Amy and I presume the Australian voice too.

I have been wondering about contacting Ivona about some of these issues, but you are right we could have language specific adjustments to text prior to Speak.

Would you like to try to find a channel through which we could feed back corrections to Ivona?

[agrogers]

:-) I dont think I have come across the 'Ark' issue. And I cant think of too many others that I have heard. Oh, 'wind' as in a 'windy road' and 'wind' as in windy day it mixes up. But that is much harder to sort out since it is context related.

Ivona have a pronunciation issue form here: https://www.ivona.com/us/contact/customer-support/
But I am not sure my two issues really fit that category. That is, it pronounces "Lord's" and "selah" fine just not how it is formatted in the ESV version. So i think adjustments prior to speech might be needed.

I didn't think about languages other than English though. I thought one simple conversion function would do the job but it might mess with languages that don't have problems. Perhaps providing the adjustment options in a text file would allow those like me to add the changes they want. It might even need to be related to the document (ie ESV or KJV or whatever). Hmm, 'simple' issues always get harder once one thinks about them.

A text document with something like "LORD's => Lord's" and "Selah=>Selah." and "ark.=>arc." would do the job for me and you :-)