Inconsistent results with role tag

Question

I'm trying to make Polly say 'live' (as in 'Live from New York!') using the role tag.  It works fine when live is at the beginning of the sentence.  But if the word is buried in the middle of the sentence, the pronunciation changes.   
  
I'm using the Windows CIL interface and Neural voices. My region is set to us-east-1.    
  
I've also tried various workarounds using the phoneme tag, but I can't get anything to work.  I think it's because I need to escape characters in the ph= option (like stress marks in ipa, and Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!" --text-type ssml good.mp3

aws polly synthesize-speech --output-format mp3 --engine neural --voice-id Joanna --text "When sharing compatible files, select Request control. This allows you to live edit the open documents during your video session." --text-type ssml bad.mp3
```

And here are the various phonem tags I've tried:

```
aws polly synthesize-speech --output-format mp3 --engine neural --voice-id Joanna --text "When sharing compatible files, select Request control. This allows you to live edit the open documents during your video session." --text-type ssml live1.mp3

aws polly synthesize-speech --output-format mp3 --engine neural --voice-id Joanna --text "When sharing compatible files, select Request control. This allows you to live edit the open documents during your video session." --text-type ssml live2.mp3

aws polly synthesize-speech --output-format mp3 --engine neural --voice-id Joanna --text "When sharing compatible files, select Request control. This allows you to live edit the open documents during your video session." --text-type ssml live3.mp3

aws polly synthesize-speech --output-format mp3 --engine neural --voice-id Joanna --text "When sharing compatible files, select Request control. This allows you to live edit the open documents during your video session." --text-type ssml live4.mp3

aws polly synthesize-speech --output-format mp3 --engine neural --voice-id Joanna --text "When sharing compatible files, select Request control. This allows you to live edit the open documents during your video session." --text-type ssml live5.mp3

aws polly synthesize-speech --output-format mp3 --engine neural --voice-id Joanna --text "When sharing compatible files, select Request control. This allows you to live edit the open documents during your video session." --text-type ssml live6.mp3

aws polly synthesize-speech --output-format mp3 --engine neural --voice-id Joanna --text "When sharing compatible files, select Request control. This allows you to live edit the open documents during your video session." --text-type ssml live7.mp3
```

Edited by: sharonhuston on Apr 7, 2020 10:11 AM  
  
More in this issue:  I'm also getting inconsistent results between the web console and the CIL.  Look at these two identical entries.  The console says "live" correctly, the command line does not.  
  
link:  
link:  
  
Edited by: sharonhuston on Apr 7, 2020 1:29 PM

Accepted Answer

Hi,  
  
To most easily get "live" (rhyming with "dive"), you can use:

```
live
```

And to get "live" (rhyming with "give"), you can use:

```
live
```

The role amazon:SENSE_0 won't work. The sense roles are numbered starting from amazon:SENSE_1. They are also typically used to disambiguate pronunciations that couldn't be done via part of speech, (e.g. "bass" as in the frequency range/guitar, or "bass" as in the fish). So the sense roles wouldn't help here.  
  
Regarding the  tag, to get the equivalent of live (rhyming with "dive"), the following would be the canonical ways to do so:

```
live

live
```

For the equivalent of live (rhyming with "give"), the following would be the canonical ways to do so:

```
live

live
```

The IPA primary stress mark character ˈ does not need to be escaped because it is not the same as the single quote character '.  
  
However, with X-SAMPA, the primary stress marker is the double quote, so it would have to be replaced in a double-quoted shell command using the equivalent XML entity: &quot;  
  
For the inconsistency between the CLI and the console, thank you for reporting that. I was unable to reproduce it on my end. Despite this, the suggestions I provided above should adequately provide you the synthesis you're looking for.  
  
Edited by: anton-at-aws on Apr 10, 2020 7:28 AM

Answer

Thank you!!  This is really helpful!!  It is nice to know that amazon:NN exists.  The Supported SSML Tags page in the documentation only lists VB and VBD.  
  
Edited by: sharonhuston on Apr 10, 2020 9:17 AM  
  
Edited by: sharonhuston on Apr 10, 2020 9:17 AM

Inconsistent results with role tag

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