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Where: Proxies ▸ Voices, in the Pronunciation section Some words are guessed wrong by any speech system: a product name, a Nordic company, a founder’s surname, an abbreviation your industry says a particular way. A fixes them, everywhere and permanently. It is worth doing. A video that mispronounces the recipient’s own company undoes the personal touch it was made for.

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What a dictionary holds

A dictionary is a named list of rules. A rule is a term as it is written in the script, and a : how it should be spoken. You can have several dictionaries, and enable or disable each one. Split them the way you think: one for your products, one per market, one for a customer list.
The pronunciation dictionaries

Your dictionaries: each shows whether it is enabled, how many rules it holds, which languages it covers, and whether it shares terms with another.

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Writing a say-as

Two notations, and the first is usually enough. A respelling is the word written the way it sounds, in ordinary letters, read in the dictionary’s language. Write what you would tell a colleague over the phone. A phonetic spelling is exact, and unambiguous, in the standard phonetic alphabet. Use it when a respelling keeps coming out slightly wrong. Write it between double angle brackets, and the editor tidies the formatting for you.
Start with a respelling and listen. Reach for phonetics only when your ear says the respelling is not landing. Most terms never need it.

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Listening

The point of the editor is that you can hear the result before anyone else does. Each rule has play buttons, one per speech engine your organization uses, and a menu for the other languages you cover. Type the customer’s name, press play, and judge with your ears. That loop takes seconds and is the only reliable way to get this right.
If a rule was not applied, you are told. When a preview plays without the dictionaries, a notice says so rather than letting you conclude your rule is wrong. Listen again before rewriting a rule that was never actually used.
A dictionary's rules

A dictionary's rules: the term, how it should be said, how many scenes and stories use it, and any warning attached to it.

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Engines say things differently

Your organization may use more than one speech engine, and they do not respond identically to the same instruction. Each rule can therefore be set per engine: Set the rule once, listen on each engine, and only add an override where you actually hear a problem.

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Knowing what a rule affects

Each rule shows how many scenes and stories currently contain that term. Before changing a widely used rule, that number tells you how much you are about to change.

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When two rules collide

If two enabled dictionaries define the same term, one of them wins and the other is marked as shadowed, with a note telling you so. The same happens for two spellings of one word that differ only in capitalisation. That is why the warning matters: without it you would edit a rule, hear no change, and conclude the feature was broken.

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Fixing a rule does not fix videos already made

A rule takes effect the next time a scene is produced. Videos that already exist keep the pronunciation they were made with, and nothing re-records itself. If a name was said wrong in something you have already sent, fix the rule and then produce that scene again.
Get your dictionaries in order before a campaign rather than after it.

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Next

Reviewing flagged terms

What the assistant flags, and how to work through it.

Building a dictionary from your list

Generate rules from a recipient list in one pass.