Narrator: Character Control

Character Control

The Characters area of the sidebar is a key part of Narrator. It includes buttons to apply, add and delete Characters, a cast list of the Character names and associated Actors, and controls to fine-tune the Actor configuration.

Actor: This is the list of available voices. Each voice has certain qualities, which can be varied by the following controls. Some are high-quality, human-sounding voices, while others are more mechanical or stylized. The voices are synthesized, rather than recorded samples, so that they can produce virtually any words, rather than just a fixed set. In addition, the top two options are special cases: Silent (read along) will read through the text like the other voices, but not actually speak anything – great for you to read your part of a play. The rate (speed) can be adjusted if desired. Whereas Silent (skip over) will simply pass over the text immediately, with a configurable delay (none by default) – useful for stage directions or background comments.
Note: If you'd like more actors (voices), check out the Narrator Voice Talent page.
Marker: This marker color is used to help quickly identify the various Characters. Clicking on the color well will display the Mac OS X Colors palette, where you can choose a suitable color. You can change the color at any time; text already marked with the old color will be changed to the new color.
Age & Gender: The age and gender that the voice represents are displayed. This may help in choosing an appropriate voice.
Rate: This slider controls the speed that the Actor speaks. It can be dragged back and forth; dragging to the left will slow the speech down, while dragging to the right will speed it up. For the Silent (skip over) Actor, this slider controls the duration of the delay before skipping the text.
Pitch: The pitch slider controls how high- or low-sounding the voice is. Again, dragging to the left will lower the pitch, and dragging to the right will raise it.
Inflection: This slider controls the amount of variation in the voice. When dragged all the way to the left, the voice is robotic-sounding, with no pitch variations. When dragged all the way to the right, it sounds rather excitable, with lots of variations. Positions between those extremes gives proportionate degrees of pitch variation. This can be used to indicate mood, e.g. low inflection is a calm, perhaps boring person, while high inflection might be someone who is excited or bubbly.
Volume: The volume slider controls how loud the voice is. The default is all the way to the right, which represents the normal volume. Dragging the slider to the left will make the voice quieter, like it is whispering.
Standard Settings: These buttons will reset each of the associated sliders to the default positions for this Actor. Useful if you are experimenting and want to reset things to normal.