How To Use Text To Speech In Storyline 360

In this video I’ll show you how you can use Text To Speech in Storyline 360 and what things you must be aware of to get the most out of it.

What is Text To Speech In Articulate Storyline

With Text to Speech Articulate Storyline converts your written text to a computer generated voice who reads your text out loud. Storyline supports 28 languages from English to Dutch and Arabic and Each language has his own voices you can choose of. In English you can choose of 7 voices, in dutch 2, a male and female and for instance in Chinese there’s one voice.

Now you know this let’s see how you can insert Text to Speech in your next Storyline project.

How To Convert Text to Speech in Storyline

1. To Insert Text To Speech in your Storyline project click the Insert Tab.
2. On the insert tab click the down arrow under the Audio button
3. Now choose text to speech
4. The insert Text to Speech window opens. In the left upper corner of this window you can select 1 of the 28 languages and you can select a voice for your Text To Speech. As earlier said each languages has his own voices.

Example: When i choose English i can choose 7 voices. When I choose for instance German I have three voices and for Chinese there’s only one voice.

5. If you want to know how the voice that you’ve chosen sound s you can click the play button before preview voice and your storyline voice will speak the sentence Hi my name is …. And I will read any text you will type here in his or her own language.
6. There are two ways to enter text here
   1. The first one is to type or copy the text that you want to read out loud.
   2. The second option is to import or copy text from your slide notes to insert to speech window. What you could do If you have a voice-over script is copy the script parts on to the notes section on each slide and you can easily import it to the insert to speech window by clicking the button copy from slide notes.
7. The text is now visible and and it’s almost time to click the insert button. But before you’ll do that you have to decide of you want closed captions for your audio file. If you want this you have to check the box in the upper right corner of the screen before Generate Closed Captions and Storyline will generate them also for you.

You can convert up to 10,000 characters at a time. If your script is longer than that, break it into smaller chunks and generate more than one text-to-speech audio clip.

8. Now it’s time to click the Insert button.
9. Storyline now converts the text to audio. On the timeline you’ll see an text to speech audio file.
10. If you want to preview the audio simple right click with your mouse on the audio file and choose ‘Preview audio’.
11. If you’re not satisfied with the audio you can simply edit the audio by right clicking it and choosing text to speech. The Insert Text To Speech window opens again and you can create adjustments.

The next step is to share some tips for using Text To Speech in Storyline so you will get the best possible result.

Tips when using Text to speech

1. The first tip when you’re using Text to Speech is that you don’t use abbreviations. Spell out the words in your script to make sure they’re pronounced correctly by your Storyline voice.
2. The second tips is that if a word that is spelled correct isn’t pronounced the way you want, you can try spelling it phonetically or add hyphens between syllables. For example, Articulate vs. Articu-late.
3. The third tip is to use punctuation in your text, such as commas and semicolons, when you want to insert brief pauses in your audio.
4. If you want langer pauses this fourth tips is helpful to you. You can simply right click your text to speech audio and click edit audio and insert longer silences. In the audio editor you can place silences by clicking on the position you want to insert the silence and click the silence button and you can give in the duration of your silence

Examples for using Text To Speech in your Next Storyline Project

You know now exactly how to Convert Text to Speech in Storyline and edit your text to speech if the pronunciation isn’t to your liking. Now let’s talk about some cases how you can use Text to Speech in your next project.

The first way to use Text To Speech is if you want to send a first version for test to your client and you know there will be adjustments. You don’t record the text by a professional voice-over but you let Storyline generate the voice-over texts for you. When your course is final and you have voice-overs recorded by a professional voice-over you can simply change the audio files by clicking replace audio. The only thing that you’ll have to check is if the timing for all your element on your timeline is still correct.

If you’re on a small budget and your course is in different languages. The text in notes is in Storylines translation file. You can simply translate the text upload it and have it read by another voice in another language. pay attention before you’re gonna translate if Storyline supports all the languages that you’ll have to translate your course to.

You can’t compare Storylines Text To Speech voices with real professional human voice-overs but I’ve used it now in a few projects and there were very few pronunciation issues. The only thing is that the voices could speak a little slower. There’s a thread about on the Articulate Forum I hope Articulate will bring an Text To Speech Feature update soon.