break Element

An empty element used to control the prosodic boundaries (pauses) between words.

Syntax

<break />
<break strength="string" />
<break time=”string” />

Attributes

Attribute	Description
strength	Optional. Specifies the relative duration of a pause using one of the following enumeration values: none, x-weak, weak, medium, strong, or x-strong. The default value is medium.
time	Optional. Specifies the absolute duration of a pause in seconds or milliseconds. Examples of valid values are 2s and 500ms.

Remarks

Use this element to override the automatic behavior of the text-to-speech (TTS) engine for a word or phrase if the automatically synthesized speech for that word or phrase sounds unnatural. The value none in the strength attribute can be used to prevent a prosodic break which the speech synthesis engine would otherwise insert.

The actual millisecond values associated with each of the enumeration values of the strength attribute depends on the individual speech synthesis engine. For break elements in which the strength or time attributes do not specify a value for the duration of the break, the speech synthesis engine automatically determines a duration value based on the linguistic context.

Example

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<speak version="1.0"
 xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/10/synthesis"
 xml:lang="en-US">

<sentence>
The phone number is one eight hundred <break strength="weak" />
five five five <break time="500ms" /> one two three four.
</sentence>

</speak>