Support of Special Character "&" in Azure Text-to-Speech Service

Question

I've noticed that the TTS service does not pronounce the "&" character, which is quite common in various contexts such as company names, product titles, and more. This limitation affects the whole output, so in case I have 3 sentences to pronounce, and "&" character in the last one, the first two sentences will be omitted as well.

I would like to understand if there are any current workarounds or plans to enhance the TTS service to support the pronunciation of the "&" character. Additionally, it would be helpful to know if there are any best practices for handling such special characters in the meantime.

Answer 1

Hi uro.sh,
Greetings & Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum! Thanks for posting your query!

It seems that the Azure Text-to-Speech (TTS) service currently does not have built-in support for automatically handling special characters like "&" in plain text mode. This can indeed cause issues with the pronunciation and overall output of the text-to-speech conversion.

One common approach is to sanitize the input text by replacing special characters with their word equivalents. For example, you can replace "&" with "and" before sending the text to the TTS engine. This ensures that the text is pronounced correctly.

You can use programming languages like Python to perform this replacement. Here is a simple example in Python:

input_text = "Team A & Team B are collaborating."
sanitized_text = input_text.replace("&", "and")
print(sanitized_text)

As of now, there is no official announcement regarding enhancements to support the pronunciation of the "&" character directly in the Azure TTS service. However, I encourage you to submit a feature request for enhancing the support for special characters like & in Azure Text-to-Speech through the Azure Feedback Forum. Here's the link to the Azure Feedback Forum: Post idea · Community (azure.com).

Hope this helps. Do let us know if you have any further queries.

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