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.