Punctuation

Punctuation serves many purposes in normal writing, it indicates sentence structural things like sentence breaks and questions, but it also serves to indicate pronunciation cues, such as commas for pauses and exclamation points for excitement.

For Rime text-to-speech, these various uses are even more flexible. Not only can users employ punctuation for traditional structural purposes, users can modulate the prosody by using differing punctuation. Below we show some basic ways our powerful engine can alter the prosody using punctuation. These are just a few examples, feel free to play around and see what you can create!

Questions

Audio Clip	Sentence	Notes
	what do you mean.	a simple period at the end of the sentence renders it a non-question
	what do you mean?	a simple question mark indicates an unmarked question
	what do you mean?!	adding an exclamation point makes the question more excited
	what do you mean!?	changing the order of the exclamation point and question mark makes a different sort of question
	what do you mean??	multiple question marks can also change the type of question prosody

False Starts

Audio Clip	Sentence	Notes
	i i think it’s pretty cool	putting a word twice in a row can create more realistic, flawed human speech
	i- i think it’s pretty cool	adding a dash immediately after some words can give a cut-off, false start sort of realism

Pauses

Audio Clip	Sentence	Notes
	so it’s kind of funny.	without any comma, there will be no pause
	so, it’s kind of funny.	adding a comma creates a slight pause
	so. it’s kind of funny.	adding a period creates a longer pause