"midnight cameras" & TND
Wed, 10/08/2014 - 10:24pm
 11 years
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I have the Rand McNally TND 520 and the speech coming from it pronounces the Red Light camera alerts such that it sounds like "midnight cameras". Maybe it was to much loud Rock & Roll in my youth and it made me half deaf I don't know but I could not tolerate it any longer. It wasn't hard to figure out that the GPS verbal alert is the file name. So I tried something and it works fairly well. I renamed the file by putting a dash inbetween Red & Light. Red-Light-Camera.csv and ya know something with that little pause in there it sounds much better. At least it does with my TND 520.
PS I suppose if you really wanted to you could rename the file to anything you want and the GPS will say it. How bout "SMILE"
listen here
Alan Funt!
Never argue with a pig. It makes you look foolish and it anoys the hell out of the pig!
several years ago
Someone posted a link or list of punctuation marks that affect speech engines. You can insert pauses into the readout of the text string much like putting periods and commas break up a printed string. A period causes a short pause, but a period by it self is spoken as "Full Stop." A dash or hyphen causes a pause, somewhere around a 10th of a second while a comma is about the same. A colon ( : ) causes about a 1/4 second delay between words.
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How Punctuation can affect synthsized speech
http://is.gd/tipNSv is a link to Apple Inc.'s Speech Synthesis Programming Guide. Scroll about half way down the linked file to a section entitled Use Punctuation Correctly. In that section, Table 3-3 lists several punctuation marks (comma, parentheses, period, and quotation mark) and describes the expected effects these marks will have on both pitch and pauses in synthesized speech
The file points out several caveats in the use of punctuation to control synthesized speech. The list is not exhaustive. Not all punctuation marks are listed in the table; however, some of those not listed (question mark, exclamation point, dash, etc.) may - or may not - affect the timing and pitch of synthesized speech.
The anticipated results are "guides" not "guarantees". Some languages do not use some of these punctuation marks, so synthesizers for other languages might not interpret them as described in Table 3-3. Context may vary the effect of any punctuation mark. Speech rate settings or other factors may also affect pitch and pauses.
Although you will always need to test spoken output with a synthesizer to find actual results, here are some examples of what you might expect: a comma will likely cause a slight rise in pitch followed by a short pause; a period will likely cause a slight fall in pitch followed by brief pause; and use of parentheses will define a range of reduced pitch, with short pauses preceding and following the range of reduced pitch.
Again, according to the file, no guarantees can be made. Results will vary according to many factors and only testing on your particular unit will let you know exactly what to expect.
Garmin nüvi 3597LMTHD, 3760 LMT, & 255LMT, - "Those who wish for fairness without first protecting freedom will end up with neither freedom nor fairness." - Milton Friedman