Articulate Storyline Text to Speech Feature and other New Year Updates

Although Articulate came up with its latest updates in November, 2017, I was able to look at them only by second week of December. And to my surprise, the updates this time made my Christmas weekend awesome. Let’s look at the latest features that Articulate has packed in the Storyline 360.

Text to Speech (TTS): The long-awaited feature is now a part of Articulate. It was a pleasant surprise to find out that the voices inherit the narrator library from Ivona Speech. I assessed Ivona’s TTS couple of years ago. It impressed me with the naturalness of its voices. After its transformation to Amazon Polly, I was unable to use it appropriately. An impressive algorithm for voice modulation and a large lingual library means it generates a voice that has a natural feel to it. Phew! now my nightmares of searching a good TTS is over. With its HUGE library of languages and narrators, Storyline 360 is sure to become the first choice for any learning designer planning to design a course with machine generated audio in it.
Auto generate (!) closed caption with TTS: Yes, you read that right. A small check box in the TTS window gives you the ability to auto-sync the closed caption with the TTS. It also enables you to capture the text for the TTS directly from the notes section.

Some other awesome updates in the current batch:

Enhanced alignment with smart guides: You can now align the object/images by just dragging them beside another object. Storyline will now show a smart line when the objects align while dragging. It will also show the dimensions of the object in real-time, when you resize it by holding its borders.
Generate random numbers within storyline: Getting random numbers through JavaScript is now a talk of the past. Storyline now has an inbuilt function to generate random numbers. Possible uses: random questions, rolling a dice in a board game and more such topics and games related to chance.
Enhanced precision and fine tuning while creating a motion path: Motion paths get a significant update with features like updating start and end points, alignment of end points with precision snapping and so on. You can learn more about it here.

Image Courtesy: Articulate

Image Courtesy: Articulate