Spanish audio conversion for US use

English is full of phrases where the same word means two, three or more different things,
reading your post made it evident how stupid it is
I don't have a solution, I sympathise with the problem

Turbocc has a program TTS_Speech_Doctor, that fixes the Doctor problem and several other problems. Play around with it and tweak it to your satisfaction. In his TTS Speech editor you can change the phrases and control the pronunciation by changing the spelling of words, until you get the results you want.

I've found TTS_Speech_Doctor. It patches only English (and probably some Canadian French) voices. As far as I understood, those patches are replacements of certain useless index entries by other more useful. I'd assume that voices indexes are not the same and not interchangable.
TTS Speech Doctor Pro (by same author) uses the same concept, but is shows you the index entries that you'd be changing.

The problem is that it works fine with Jack (English) but as long as I try with the Spanish Paulina or Javier (as well as the European Spanish ones), the index entries to be replaced look too strange (weird symbols) and when I scroll down, it appears a "file corrupted" message.

All files I'm trying are the latest TTS (not TTS2 or TTS3) with a size of around 2MB. They are TTS(v) files (i.e. Paulina TTS(v) 1.10

I can't get what the "(v)" means.

There are other TTS files of the same date, without the (v) but with a 15Mb size and an extension ".rgn" instead of .vpm.

A rgn file is also accepted by the TTS Sp Dr Pro, but I get the same results than with the other one (Paulina TTS 1.70).
A previous rgn version (1.30) it also does not work because it does not have the index table.

Looks like I'm close to get it, but I can't take the final step.

Since Turboccc has not been maintaining his programs for a couple of years now, I am not surprised if TTS Speech Doctor does not support the newer TTS3 files, especially non-English files. He did pop in here a few months ago when the EPE (Extra POI Editor) failed because of some changes in Google maps. At that time, he graciously fixed EPE to help out the POI Factory members, so maybe we will here from him again on this progarm.

Alandb,

I'm not using the new TTS2 or TTS3. I was using the latest TTS (which have some years already) and even some older ones.

But your comment made me notice that I was using a Windows 8.1 notebook that for sure was not in place when Turboccc had developed these tools.

I'm going to give them a try at a Windows 7 machine. I doubt that this would make any difference, but it's worth trying.

Thanks

Nop, it doesn't work with Windows 7 either.

It's something related to the Spanish voices (both Latam or European ones), because Jack 2.0 works great.

This is far way beyond my skills. I think I'll have to leave with the Buena Vista Doctor instead of Drive speech.

Talk to Garmin. I believe they did some work on the voice files to correct that particular problem. You can't really call it an error in the voice engine, it has to do with a change in the maps. A few years ago they went from DR which would render as Drive to Dr which is interpreted as doctor. The change also affected business routes where BR is the correct abbreviation for business route to Br which was spoken as branch. Of course, that could be a problem (in my area where we do have a Doctor Bird road. I usually just pass through the intersection so I don't know how the unit would announce the road. It would be equally as funny as being told to tune in to Lake Trail Doctor as it would be to turn on Drive Bird road.

I found it easier to just use an English speaking voice when in the USA and Spanish voice when traveling to Guadalajara.

Most streets in the USA have an English sounding names and is not easy for the Spanish voice of your choice to pronounce it.

I'm bilingual but prefer to watch TV, receive instructions, and conduct most of my business in English the universal language.

It irks me when the ATM in the USA ask if I want to conduct the transaction in Spanish, have you seen and ATM asking the Pollacks, Ukrainians, French, Germans if they prefer to use their native language?

No más por favor!

Probably this is off topic, but I guess that the ATM language is related to the card one. So, probably a German would receive the option to conduct the transaction in German. I can't imagine Ukranian but probably the major languages including some Asian ones are included. Spanish is for sure one of them.

Box Car and Flaco,

Finally I got it done. I'll post it later during the week. In short, some Spanish TTS voices version look like having a different structure.

But 2 European Spanish previous versions (not the last ones) have the same table than the English TTS ones. Therefore, I could change the abbreviations.

Phonetics is other topic. But the same happens if you use the Turboccc list for the Spanish abbreviations and you want to use it with an English language.

So, in my case, if I want to change Dr to Drive, and I write down ="drive" I would hear literally "drive" in Spanish. So, I write down "draif" instead and that literally read in Spanish is almost equal to the English pronunciation of "drive".