Noodle Flix Tips and Tricks

Noodle Flix uses powerful speech engines provided by Apple and Cepstral to make its speech sound as realistic as possible, but sometimes it may not produce speech like you want.

Fortunately, there is something you can do about it. Below are some useful tricks you can use in Noodle Flix to make speech more like-like, or if you so desire, less life-like. These pointers will guide you in how to tweak speech production in Noodle Flix in ways that may not be obvious to you at first glance.

Pausing Speech

One of the most common questions we are asked is "How do I make speech pause between phrases, sentences, and paragraphs?" Human speech is loaded with silence. Some silence conveys meaning, while other pauses occur so the speaker can take a breath. Regardless, adding pauses of silence to speech can help produce better sounding speech and can also be used for various effects.

Pausing with Plain Language

When using Apple voices, the Script section of the Noodle Flix interface displays two text fields: Plain Language and Script. The Plain Language field is where you enter text as if you were speaking or writing a letter. Besides regular text, you can also embed special speech commands, defined by Apple's speech engine. Speech commands are embedded within brackets to denote them as commands and not part of the text that should be read by the speech engine. One such command is the "silence" command. The speech command for silence looks like this:

[[slnc 500]]

As mentioned, the brackets denote that this is a speech command. The "slnc" letters make up the "silence" command and the number that follows is how long the silence should last, in this case 500 milliseconds. (TIP: 1000 milliseconds = 1 second). So, this speech command would insert a half second of silence.

Now, let's see it in action. Noodle Flix launches with the greeting "Welcome to Noodle Flix". If you would like to insert a pause affter "Welcome", the Plain Language field would look like this:

Welcome [[slnc 500]] to Noodle Flix

Then, when you click the "Script from Plain Language" button, Noodle Flix will insert this silence into the utterance for Apple voices. Cepstral voices can skip the button-click step.

Other Speech Commands

There are other speech commands that you can embed within Noodle Flix speech, much like the silence command described above. You can read more about them here: Apple Speech Commands

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