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‌Talking to Synthia

Synthia is capable of interactive speech control, but this requires leading-edge support from your operating system, and some attention to the setup in any case.

Again: You don’t have to use voice! It’s just an option. Don ’t get hung up on that. See “ Don’t talk” on the IA button’s right-click menu and the “Enable speech by default” checkbox in the Synthia section of SynthEyes ’s preferences.

Synthia is largely not responsible for the quality, or lack thereof, of speech recognition that you obtain from the operating system. If speech recognition is not working for you, and even if it is, you can always use keyboard input. Over time the OS vendors will continually improve their speech recognition performance. Third- party voice recognizers, eg Nuance, may offer higher-performing recognition, but we have not tested such software.

To speak to Synthia, read the section Microphone and Speech Setup; that is very important (100% crucial on Mac). The following are covered:

- the operating system’s speech synthesis and recognition controls,

- Synthia command sentences affecting speech,

- SynthEyes preferences affecting Synthia startup, There are a few conventions you should know as well:

- Say "ticks" to get apostrophe followed by "s", i.e. possessives, for example the red trackers vs the red tracker ticks position . (ie the red tracker' s position)

- Say "quote" and "unquote" as needed (though at present they are treated the same), ie say quote have a nice day unquote.

- Substitutions such as period or comma may be handled by your computer’s voice recognizer, though Synthia will handle them and many more itself (and that is generally preferable)

- Say literal word period or literal words percentage sign to include the words themselves, rather than the usual symbol.

own.

These are all examples of Synthia input substitutions; naturally you can add your

Exercise: try the nice day example above, then control-up-arrow.

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