OpenEVV SAPI5 1.2.2: shorter pauses at punctuation

OpenEVV SAPI5 1.2.2 adds a Punctuation pauses setting: the engine's long pauses at commas, full stops, question marks and exclamation marks, and the silence after the last word of everything it says, can now be shortened, the way the IBMTTS driver for NVDA does it.

Installing

Download OpenEVV-SAPI5-Setup-1.2.2.exe and run it. You can run it with your screen reader running: nothing is closed and Windows does not need to restart. It installs over earlier versions and keeps your settings and languages. A program that was already running when you installed, such as your screen reader, keeps speaking as before until you close it and start it again. Windows may show "Windows protected your PC" for a new unsigned download: choose More info, then Run anyway.

What's new

• Punctuation pauses, on the Speech page of OpenEVV Configuration, with the IBMTTS driver's three choices:
  • Do not shorten: the engine's own pauses. This is the default, so nothing sounds different until you choose otherwise.
  • Shorten at end of text only: the silence of about 400 ms after the last word of every text goes. That is what a screen reader waits through after every announcement and every character it speaks.
  • Shorten all pauses: every pause at a comma, full stop, colon, semicolon, question mark, exclamation mark and dash becomes about 40 ms, from about 155 for a comma and 400 for the others. The mark still gives the phrase its melody: a question still rises.
• It works in all 155 languages, the ten the engine speaks itself and the 145 read by eSpeak NG. A change is heard on the next thing any program says.
• The method is the driver's: the engine's one-unit pause annotation goes in front of each mark. Two differences, on purpose: a full stop that ends an abbreviation ("Mr.", "Dr.", "St.", an initial, the "3." of a German date) is left alone, because the annotation would stop the engine's dictionary from reading it as a word; and "end of text only" also covers a text that ends with a mark, as the driver's documentation says.
• While pauses are shortened, a backquote in the text is read as a space, as the driver does. The "Honour backquote annotations" setting keeps them. Nothing is added while spelling.
• Includes 1.2.1's quicker install: setup no longer speaks every voice to test it after copying the files. The self-test is still on the Diagnostics page of OpenEVV Configuration.

Full details are in CHANGELOG.md.

The language packs and samples zips of 1.2.0 are unchanged and still current: v1.2.0.