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Hello, Halle.
With the licensed NeatSpeech version,
when I check the operations for speed test on the iPhone4 device(iOS6.1),
I got to find a bug.I created a long text that contains no punctuation.
And, I set the text to the argument of the “sayWithNeatSpeech:withVoice:”.As a result, when 21.62 seconds has elapsed since the start speaking(The bottom line is ‘FliteController.audioPlayer.isPlaying=YES’), the speech was stopped.
It is the same result even if I change the slow speed.(When 21.62 seconds has elapsed, it stopped.)
And, This is the same result on the iPhone5.Thank you for your consideration.
Your anticipated assistance in this matter is greatly appreciated.Best regards,
HitoshiHello Hitoshi,
This isn’t a bug, there is a maximum length that is possible with a single utterance that has no punctuation in order to prevent unacceptable memory overhead. The maximum length is longer than unpunctuated sentences ever are in English. Just continue to use punctuation or add the pause token that is described in the documentation.
Hi Hitoshi,
Can you give an example of a real sentence from your app that you need to say that encounters this limit and is not possible to place any commas, periods, or the pause token in? The sentence consisting of >20 repetitions of the letter w in a row doesn’t look like something that occurs in a real app interaction, but if I’m not correct about that, you could perform it in your app without a problem by programmatically placing a comma or a pause token in between the middle two “w”s, or between all of them. Unfortunately it isn’t possible to return anything from say:withNeatSpeech:usingVoice: because it is an asynchronous method and the time of the utterance is known after synthesizing it.
The size of the maximum unpunctuated utterance was intentionally chosen based on the fact that it is several times larger than real sentence clauses in English. You can see this in the case of your choice of “w”, which contains the syllables of two complete words (‘double’ and ‘you’). In order for a sentence clause to occur which needed to render as many syllables as your test sentence, it would need to be an unpunctuated clause containing ~52 words. I’m not aware of a clause like this. But the pause token was added to the API specifically so that you would never need to have your users hear speech that is cut off, since you can programmatically insert it into long text that lacks punctuation.
I’m not opposed to examining this in the long term, but I’d want to start with a real usage case that is creating an issue for someone in their app.
Hi Hitoshi,
Your English is great and I know how it is to have to speak with subtlety in a second language, since I have to use a second language frequently and also worry that I sound too brusque when I am making requests.
I will definitely take your suggestion on board and consider the best way to integrate it in a future version, thank you for your suggestions. The most likely solution to the long unpunctuated speech question will just be to force a split on long unpunctuated text streams, since the lack of punctuation means there will be no contextual cues and the location of the split can be arbitrary (meaning: without any punctuation, we don’t know where the writer of the sentence meant to have clauses or emphasis, so we can split it anywhere because there is no better option). I’m not sure if I want to change the API to accomplish this goal but I will consider what you said.
To give you a preview for how I would be likely to do the long sentence splitting, I will probably implement an NSScanner to count incidents of whitespace between words and pick an arbitrary value that are “too many” spaces without there also being any punctuation or pauses, and insert a pause token before sending it to synthesis. So you could also use this as your workaround right now if you need this immediately.
I wanted to mention that in order to look into this issue it is still important to receive an example of this which occurs naturally in your app, since it is needed in order to design an appropriate fix and to assign the fix a priority. So far, there has never been a bug report of this occurring “in the wild” because it was designed to be an improbable event, so it would be good to get a real example of how it occurred in your app in a form that prevents the pause token from being used, in order to understand the first case of it appearing as an issue.
If your app reads different sources, just let me know about a source which leads to this issue — you can also inform me by email in order to keep it private.
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