Read aloud word by word

  1. 8 years ago

    How can I make sure that the last word in the text on a page is highlighted and the Audio plays at full length?

    When I play my read aloud text, the last word of the Audio file is cut of. When I use the read aloud tool an tap for every word, after the last word of the Text Pubcoder gives me an "end" to tab on. I always paused to press this finish button, so that the audio would not be cut of, but this had the oposite effect. But when I push it to soon, same effect. The Problem does not show in the preview, only in the final EPUBon the iPad, and not on every page. Therefore, at some pages I must have done something right, but don't know what it was.
    Also, the last word is not always highlighted, and I don't know when or why.
    Please help, I am desperate! Thank You!
    (Word by word highlighting is very exhausting..)

  2. Paolo A

    12 Feb 2016 Administrator

    Anna,

    truth is the Read-aloud tool is not optimized to make it word by word - as you are experiencing. Most best practices suggest not to highlight word by word, as this distracts the user from the flowing process of reading and listening, that is why we decided to provide a system that enables you to divide the text more into significant "blocks" - using punctuation marks as the splitting character. Of course this is just a suggestion, you can do a word by word but the tagging is certainly not precise - hence frustrating.

    Plus, highlighting word by word can change according to the reader - in your case, iPad works differently to the preview, this is because probably it's too "quick" and the reader is unable to catch up with it.

    We will have to think of a different tool to achieve precisely what you are looking for, still we cannot intervene on the reader's side.

  3. Hello Anna, I am not sure if this helps but it is worth a shot. Edit your audio and try to generate 1-2 seconds of silence towards of of the every audio clip when you are editing for every page. This can be done using an open source audio editing program called Audacity.

    I have not done word by word tagging, however, when my last sentence/phrase is tagged on a page, I do not hit "End" and I simply allow the audio to run until the end as I have the 2 seconds of silence that I generated towards the end of the audio. This ensures the last word in your audio clip doesn't get cut off.

    I hope this helps.

  4. 7 years ago

    hi, Paolo
    I encountered the same issue. PubCoder is very impressive. However, this read aloud 'word by word' feature is very important for early child learning. Each word needs to be highlight . You may see many children 'read aloud' ebooks having this feature. When I tried PubCoder, I was very struggling to match my voice speed to each word . My suggestion , if possible ,can you program a function that can adjust the playback sound slow, so we can catch each word easily , but still not messing up the same time code location of each word ?
    Thanks so much for your help.

    Tracy

  5. 5 years ago
    Edited 5 years ago by Keith G

    Further to tracy's comment above, yes, word-by-word highlighting is important not only in early child learning, but for all children who are struggling readers and in need special leveled or phonics based readers. This is an important market for read-along technology.

    What is needed I think is a whole new tool/interface for word by word or phrase highlighting... one where we see the audio sequencing track and can slide markers back and forth -- or easier still - let us import an audacity file where the markers are inserted and convert that to your .smil file.

 

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