Creating English Audio Texts for Slash Reading/Listening with the Voice-Synthesis System Google Cloud Text to Speech
抄録
This technical note describes how to create an audio text with pauses for “slash” reading/listening (aka “phrase” or “chunk” reading/listening) by using a voice synthesis system. In general, English textbooks do not have audio CDs or files for slash reading. This is also true for the variety of English texts and passages freely available on the Internet. In these cases,
the instructors still might want to create audio files for pedagogical purposes. Therefore, this
paper explains a step-by-step procedure to create audio files with pauses for slash reading by
utilizing Google Cloud Text to Speech, along with “break,” an SSML tag. Although the created
audios are not natural voice, they should still help students learn English more effectively.