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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!

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Questions

Audio ClipSentenceNotes
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

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False Starts

Audio ClipSentenceNotes
i i think it’s pretty coolputting a word twice in a row can create more realistic, flawed human speech
i- i think it’s pretty cooladding a dash immediately after some words can give a cut-off, false start sort of realism

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Pauses

Audio ClipSentenceNotes
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