Is there a way to increase/add the pause between words? about flite HOT 2 OPEN

Thank you for your response.

Flite does care about word boundaries in its predictions (even though it
doesn't show that in the list of segments).

Does it have any variables that are used to generate that break? If possible a scale parameter just like for the overall voice, but only to be applied for the breaks. Same scale parameter could work for word boundaries, phrases boundaries and sentence boundaries and I'll be fine with it. And if there isn't one, maybe we can add it if there is the code to generate that silence.

--setf duration_stretch doesn't work much for me because it also slows down the words which sounds weird if I want larger break between words.

I did found a thing called utterance break in the source code so I thought the sentences were changed to utterances not words. But even then I couldn't find how to modify the duration of that thing. I also tried to look at how utterances are used but to no avail. Somehow it looks like the wave struct seems to have samples array which may have those voices between the breaks.

I also looked at the file testsuite/by_word_main.c to see if it has the thing I want, it looks promising but it seems to be mostly focused on printing. But this seems to be by far the best option, though I wasn't able to modify it to increase the break.

You can explicitly put in breaks by using ssml, speech synthesis markup
language. See flite/tools/example.ssml, you need to add -ssml to go into
ssml mode.

Thank you for this, I did give it a look and it does help in adding breaks. However it doesn't seem to be perfect, for example:

This <break /> is <break /> a  <break /> pen.

Doesn't sound natural, the pronunciation of a is truncated. While the line below sounds fine.

This <break /> is <break /> a  pen.

So unless I have to parse a sentence to find the natural break points myself it'd be hard to use.

Which gets me back to the reason I was hoping to just drag a little of that silence between the words/phrases whatever that festival uses so I don't have to work hard.

Sorry for the trouble. Hopefully it isn't much.

from flite.

from flite.