Unwanted pauses when using <prosody> tag in SSML for TTS

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I am writing and marking up spoken utterances for an VUI tool. We are using Google Cloud Wave-net for our TTS service, and I have been trying to use SSML to make the TTS output more natural. When I add the tag "prosody", the TTS output adds a pause before the start of the tag, as in the below:

<speak> Rebecca is allergic to <prosody rate="slow" range="high">soybean oil.</prosody> Would you like to cancel this order? </speak>

In this example, the TTS output pauses between "to" and "soybean oil". This is just a silly example sentence, but in our real product we need to use this kind of tag to provide emphasis and differentiation between complex words.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? Any tips?

ssml text-to-speech
1 Answers

It looks like range isn't part of the Google Cloud TTS ssml spec. It is part of Microsoft's spec though, so maybe that's what you were thinking of.

If you're still trying to get rid of a gap like that, you could theoretically use the <seq> tag to get the segments to slightly overlap, but that seems like it'd be super difficult.

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