Why does OSX Text to Speech occasionally garble/skip words on me?

March 11, 2013 4:41 PM

In order to reduce eyestrain when on the computer, I use the basic OSX (10.6.8) Text to Speech (System Prefs -> Speech -> Text to Speech) software for the computer to read out long-form articles found online. This works great! Except....sometimes when I ask "Alex" to read out to me it will skip or garble words from the highlighted article, usually one word per sentence or after x number of words. Why?

If I stop the software while it's reading, I can usually get it to not skip words after highlighting the article again. I know it's not a word-recognition issue since Alex spells out the word if it's unknown, and it happens if I use the the print version of the articles or straight from the source. Again, it usually stops skipping words on the second go-around so I don't think it's 'reading' code from the websites. Why does it do this and what can I do to fix this? I don't need a fancy-pants speech software like JAWS since I only use this for long articles.

posted by carabiner to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

When you say "skip or garble", what does it sound like? When I use text-to-speech (not OSX), sometimes the stress is on the wrong syllable and that really makes a word sound garbled in English (because we change the non-stressed vowels to schwa and produce non-stressed syllables faster and text-to-speech does this too - just sometimes to the wrong ones). Since you say it happens differently if you highlight differently, and that it is after a certain number of words, I wonder whether it is a bug with their model for interaction of word stress and phrase or sentence stress. (We usually have a more heavily stressed word per phrase and per sentence as well as stressed syllables within words.)
posted by lollusc at 5:29 PM on March 11, 2013