Q.

How do I set TTS volume and speed?

A.

You may want to make a global change to the speed or volume of text-to-speech (TTS) prompts in your application. Altering speed or volume is easy to do by changing parameters in the Speechify configuration files, and then restarting the Speechify Voice service.

To set TTS volume and speed:

1. In a text editor, open the configuration file for the application's TTS voice. For example, the Jill voice configuration file for English (United States) applications is Ojill8.xml. By default, Ojill8.xml is located at the path Program Files\Common Files\SpeechEngines\ScanSoft\Speechify\en-US\jill.
2. To change the TTS speed rate, find and change the value attribute for tts.audio.rate. The default value is 100.
3. To change the TTS volume, find and change the value attribute for tts.audio.volume. The default value is 30.
4. Restart the appropriate Speechify Voice service as described in the following steps.
5. On the Windows® taskbar, click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Services.
6. In the Services pane right-click Speechify Voice - voice, where voice is the voice service you want to restart, and then click Restart.

Use the ssml:prosody element to change the speed and volume of individual prompts. Use the TTS voice's configuration file to make a global change to TTS characteristics.