Copyright: (c) Creative Technology Ltd


Help Contents
Contents

Overview

TextAssist Control Panel

The Interface

Understanding The Basic Control Panel Interface

Understanding The Advanced Control Panel Interface

Understanding The TextAssist Control Panel Menus

Working with The Control Panel

Learning To Make Application Associations With The Control Panel

Learning To Make Dictionary Associations With The Control Panel

Configuring The TextReader With The Control Panel


TextAssist Control Panel

The TextAssist Control Panel centralizes all the features of TextAssist into one powerful application. With the Control Panel, the power of the latest in text-to-speech technology is limited only by your imagination.

You can choose to configure the settings of the TextReader and the TextAssist Dictionary from within the Control Panel. Assign specific voices to specific applications, or simply create your own voice and save it for future use. With all the options available for customizing different voices, take time to explore and experiment with the Control Panel. You can generate extremely realistic speech...on the other hand, you might produce some very strange and exotic sounds...!


Understanding The Basic Control Panel Interface

The TextAssist Control Panel has two modes of operation: Basic and Advanced.

When you first launch the Control Panel from Windows, it will appear in Basic mode. In Basic mode, you can perform the following operations:

1. Select a different voice from the Voice list box.

2. Change the rate, pitch, and volume settings.

3. Listen to the speech produced by the current voice.

4. Add a new voice to the Voice list box.

5. Delete a voice from the Voice list box.

6. Activate the Advanced Control Panel Interface.

Related Topics:

Selecting A Voice From The Voice List Box

Changing The Rate, Pitch, And Volume Settings

Listening To The Voices.

Adding A New Voice To The Voice List

Delete A Voice From The Voice List

Activating The Advanced Control Panel Interface


Selecting A Voice From The Voice List Box

To select the current voice from the Voice list box, just do the following:

 1. Click on the voice you wish to select.

You can use the scrollbar to scan through all the available voices.

TextAssist comes with nine pre-defined voices. These are indicated in a light-blue color (to distinguish them from user-created voices). There are four male voices, four female voices, and one child voice.

The nine pre-defined voices have the following names and descriptions:

Name of voice	Description of voice
Paul	Standard male voice
Harry	Deep male voice
Frank	Older male voice
Dennis	Breathy male voice
Betty	Standard female voice
Rita	Deep female voice
Ursula	Light female voice
Wendy	Whispery female voice
Kit	Child voice


Changing The Rate, Pitch, And Volume Settings

To change the rate, pitch, or volume of the current voice, simply adjust the relevant slider controls.

Note: These changes are made in real time. If you click on the Speak button and change the rate, pitch, or volume, you will immediately be able to hear the differences.


Listening To The Voices.

To hear how the selected voice sounds like, simply click on the [image] button.

You will hear the sentence "Hello, this  is <name of voice>" repeated over and over.

Notice the button you clicked has now changed to [image] .To end the speech, simply click on this button.


Adding A New Voice To The Voice List

To add a new voice to the Voice listbox, follow these simple steps:

1. Click on the [image] button.

2.  In the Voice edit box, type in the name you want to assign to this voice and press <Enter>.

Note - the settings of this voice is the same as the voice highlighted in the Voice listbox.

3.  The name you typed in now appears in the Voice list box. You can modify the basic rate, pitch, and volume settings of this  new voice through the relevant slider controls. You can also modify other, more complex settings to customize your new voice. Please refer to the section Understanding The Advanced Control Panel  Interface for more details.

TextAssist allows you to create a maximum of 64 voices. Have fun!


Delete A Voice From The Voice List

To delete a voice from the Voice list, follow these steps:

1. Select the voice to be deleted in the Voice list box.

2. Click on the [image] button.

3. A dialog box will appear, asking you to confirm your decision. If you wish to continue with deleting the chosen voice, click on Yes. If you want to reconsider, click on No. If you chose Yes, then the voice that you selected will be deleted from the Voice list box...forever...

While you can delete any voice that you have created yourself, you cannot delete any of the nine pre-defined voices that comes with the TextAssist package.


Activating The Advanced Control Panel Interface

To switch from the Basic mode to the Advanced mode in the Control Panel, just click on the [image] button.


Understanding The Advanced Control Panel Interface

After you switch from Basic to Advanced mode with the [image] button, the Advanced Control Panel Interface will appear .

The Advanced Control Panel allows you to adjust other variables that affect how a voice sounds. You can modify the following five factors:

1. Gender	Choose between Male or Female.
2. Head size	Yes, it's true. The larger our head, the sexier you sound! Actually,  you can move the slider to change the size of the head, producing a deeper or higher pitched sound (depending on the size you select).
3. Smoothness	Move the slider towards the Smooth end of the scale to smoothen the flow of speech. If you want the speech to sound coarser, just move the slider towards the end of the scale labeled Coarse.
4. Richness	Modify the richness of the current speech, depending on your preference for a heavy or a light sounding voice.
5. Laryngealization	Modify the intensity of the current voice's laryngealization by moving the slider towards the Low or High end of the scale.
All the changes that you make can be heard immediately by clicking on the Speak button. As the current voice is repeating the "Hello, this is <name of voice>" sentence, adjust the settings and listen to the difference!

To switch back to Basic mode, click on the [image] button.


Understanding The TextAssist Control Panel Menus

The TextAssist Control Panel contains three menus: File, Configure, and Help.

File Menu

The File menu consists of the following commands:

Import...	Brings up a dialog box that allows you to load a previously defined voice. You need to specify the file name under which this voice was saved to disk.
Export...	Brings up a dialog box that allows you to save a defined voice to disk. You need to specify the file name which this voice will be saved under.
Restore	Activates a cascading menu (Figure 2-5) which allows you to restore the default settings of individual voices, or to restore all the voices to their default settings.
Exit	Quits the Control Panel.
Note: File names for voices will be saved with the extension <filename>.tav

Configure Menu

The Configure menu contains the following commands:

Association	Brings up the Application Associations dialog box. Please refer to the section titled Learning To Make Application Associations With The Control Panel  for further details.
Dictionary	Brings up the Dictionary Associations dialog box. Please refer to the section titled Learning To Make DictionaryAssociations With The Control Panel for further details.
Reader	Brings up the TextReader Configuration dialog box. Please refer to the section titled Configuring The TextReader With The Control Panel  for more details.
Language	Allows the TextAssist control panel to be configured to any TextAssist foreign language speech module. These modules can be obtained separately from Creative. The default language setting is English.
Help Menu

The Help menu contains the following commands:

Contents	Displays index entries to the On-line Help system. To obtain more information on a particular entry, simply click on it.
About TextAssist Control Panel	Provides the credit and copyright information about the application.


Learning To Make Application Associations With The Control Panel

TextAssist allows you to associate a particular voice to any Windows application through the Application Associations feature. You can select a sultry female voice to read back your electronic mail, or perhaps choose a deep, heavy voice for your word processing documents.

Once an application is associated with a voice, it will always default to that voice for all its text-to-speech functions. For example, if you associate the voice of Betty with Windows' NotePad, then by default you will hear Betty read out your text documents whenever NotePad is launched. Naturally, should you feel that maybe the voice of Wendy is more suited to reading documents, you can always re-associate Write with Wendy's voice. And yes, you can also associate the voices that you have created to any application.

Related Topics:

Associating Applications With Voices

Adding More Applications

Deleting An Application From The Associated Applications List

Saving Your Voice Associations


Associating Applications With Voices

To associate an application with its own unique voice:

1. Select Configure from the Control Panel menu bar.

2. Select Association from the Configure pull-down menu.

The Application Associations dialog box shown below will appear.

The names of all the applications which have already been associated with a voice are listed in the Associated Apps list box. To find out which voice is associated to an application, simply click on the application's name.

For example, clicking on Notepad reveals that it is currently associated with the voice of  Harry.

The names of all the voices available for association are listed in the Voice Names list box. Any new voices that you have created will also be shown here.

Now, let us associate Notepad with a new voice. To do so:

3. Click on Notepad in the Associated Apps list box. It will be highlighted.

4. Select a voice from the Voice Names list box by clicking on it. For this example, we will select Wendy.

The voice of Wendy is now associated with the Windows Notepad. The next time  you run Notepad with the TextReader active, the text from Notepad will be read back to you with Wendy's voice.

To test the currently selected voice:

5. Click on the [image] button.

If you find that Wendy's sensual tones are not appropriate for Notepad documents, you can easily change the voice by clicking on another name in the Voice Names list box.


Adding More Applications

When you use the Application Associations function for the very first time, you will notice that there are a limited number of applications which have already been associated with a voice. You can add to this number of applications by observing the following steps:

1. Click on the [image] button.

Notice that the Voice Names list box has now become the Running Apps list box .

The Running Apps list box contains all the other applications that are currently running in Windows, but do not yet have a voice associated with them.

To add a particular application to the list of Associated Apps:

2. Click on the name of the application in the Running Apps list box to select it.

Let's choose the Windows' Paint program. The Paint entry in the Running Apps list box is highlighted once you click on it.

3. Click on the [image] button.  You have now added Paint to the list of associated applications! A new Paint entry appears in the Associated Apps list box .

If you want to add all the presently active Windows applications to the Associated Apps list box, simply click on the [image] button.

Now that you have added a new application (or applications) to the list of Associated Apps, you might want to define the voices for these applications. To do so:

4. Click on the [image] button. The Application Associations dialog box returns to its previous form.

5. Follow the steps on Associating Applications with Voices, as described in  the preceding section.


Deleting An Application From The Associated Applications List

To remove an application from the list of associated applications, do the following:

1. Click on the name of the application that you wish to delete in the Associated Apps list box.

2. Click on the [image] button.

If, at a later time, you wish to re-associate a voice with this application,  you will have to add the application back to the Associated Apps list. Please refer to the section on Adding More Applications for details on this procedure.

Remember, you are not deleting this application itself! You are only deleting the association between the application and a TextAssist voice.


Saving Your Voice Associations

Once you are satisfied with your selection of voices, just click on the [image] button to save your choices and return to the TextAssist Control Panel.

If you wish to exit to the Control Panel without saving your choices, click on the [image] button.


Learning To Make Dictionary Associations With The Control Panel

Through the TextAssist Control Panel, the TextReader can be associated any dictionary file to enable specific pronunciations of words. For example, if you are using the TextReader to read back a text file with many scientific terms, you might want to associate TextReader with a dictionary file made up of scientific words and pronunciations.

To create such a dictionary, please refer to the chapter on the TextAssist Dictionary for further information.

To associate the TextReader with such a dictionary (or any particular dictionary that you wish the TextReader to refer to during its reading of text), follow these steps:

1. Select Configure from the Control Panel menu bar.

2. Select Dictionary from the Configure pull-down menu.

The Dictionary Associations dialog box will appear.

3. Select the dictionary file you wish to associate TextReader with by clicking on the name of the dictionary file.

4. Click on the OK button to accept the selected dictionary file. TextReader is now associated to the dictionary file that you selected, and will refer to it whenever it reads back any text.

If you do not wish to associate this dictionary file with TextReader, click on the Cancel button.


Configuring The TextReader With The Control Panel

To change the default settings for the TextAssist Text Reader, follow these steps:

1. Click on Configure from the Control Panel menu bar.

2. Select Reader from the Configure pull-down menu.

The TextReader Configuration dialog box will appear.

To change the color of the TextReader button bar:

1. Click on any one of the three available color schemes.

Once you are satisfied with all the changes that you have made to the TextReader's settings, click on the OK button to exit and save the new configuration. If you want to exit without saving any of the changes, click on the Cancel button.