I'm performing some text-to-speech and I'd like to specify some special pronunciations in a lexicon file. I have ran MSDN's AddLexicon example verbatim, and it speaks the sentence but it does not use the given lexicon, something appears to be broken.
Here's the provided example:
using System;
using Microsoft.Speech.Synthesis;
namespace SampleSynthesis
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
// Initialize a new instance of the SpeechSynthesizer.
using (SpeechSynthesizer synth = new SpeechSynthesizer())
{
// Configure the audio output.
synth.SetOutputToDefaultAudioDevice();
PromptBuilder builder = new PromptBuilder();
builder.AppendText("Gimme the whatchamacallit.");
// Append the lexicon file.
synth.AddLexicon(new Uri("c:\\test\\whatchamacallit.pls"), "application/pls+xml");
// Speak the prompt and play back the output file.
synth.Speak(builder);
}
Console.WriteLine();
Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit...");
Console.ReadKey();
}
}
}
<lexicon version="1.0"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/01/pronunciation-lexicon"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.w3.org/2005/01/pronunciation-lexicon
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/CR-pronunciation-lexicon-20071212/pls.xsd"
alphabet="x-microsoft-ups" xml:lang="en-US">
<lexeme>
<grapheme> whatchamacallit </grapheme>
<phoneme> W S1 AX T CH AX M AX K S2 AA L IH T </phoneme>
</lexeme>
</lexicon>
c:\test\whatchamacallit.pls
@"C:\Temp\whatchamacallit.pls"
@"file:///c:\test\whatchamacallit.pls"
File.OpenRead
PromptBuilder.AppendTextWithPronunciation
After a lot of research and pitfalls I can assure you that your assumption is just plain wrong.
For some reason System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer.AddLexicon()
adds the lexicon to an internal list, but doesn't use it at all.
Seems like nobody tried using it before and this bug went unnoticed.
Microsoft.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer.AddLexicon()
(which belongs to the Microsoft Speech SDK) on the other hand works as expected (it passes the lexicon on to the COM object which interprets it as advertised).
Please refer to this guide on how to install the SDK: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh362873%28v=office.14%29.aspx
Notes: