Vnext use case.

www.rnib.org.uk provide as part of its service, 
audio versions of books, both leisure and other reading.
For certain books where the content is as important or 
more important than the quality of the voice, we started
to use synthetic speech (tts) around two years ago.
Audio navigation is provided by LF tones (one to three of
4 seconds duration) which SSML allows.

We mainly deliver on audio cassettes, of 45 minutes per side.
One of our main problems is automating the process of generating
the audio in 45 minute chunks. It requires that we physically
monitor the process and stop the tts engine appropriately.

Hence the need to have the SSML implementation (interpreter +
tts engine combination) indicate to a controlling application
when a certain duration of audio has been produced. 
  This is not a post production edit of an audio file. The need
is for the engine to be stopped when n minutes of audio has been produced.
If the engine is working in real time, then it would be n minutes after
starting the tts process, if faster then the duration would be similarly
shorter. The end product should be an audio file which plays for the
specified duration or less. 
  The ideal solution would be for the SSML system to stop production at some
structural boundary identifiable from the source SSML document.


Regards DaveP.

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Received on Thursday, 18 September 2003 05:23:31 UTC