I have been trying to find this answer for weeks, did some trial and error but am having no luck.
I have a couple Rules Set that at specific times of day, and some with a contact sensor, my Echo's make announcments (greetings, weather etc..)
For those with custom announcements that I have written... I want to add a pause in the middle. Right now the Echo/Alexa just reads everything continuously and it sounds very unnatural.
I get "Welcome Home Sara How was your day Its 4 oclock"
I'd like to get Welcome Home Sara, How was your day? It's 4 oclock.
It doesn't really come through in the written form but I want to insert like a 1/2 second pause to slow the cadence of the message and make it flow nicer.
The only way you can accomplish this is by having multiple notification actions in your rule, each with a delay. Currently, you can't slow down the cadence or do anything with SSML. I had previously thought that we could use SSML to do it, but it looks like notifications get stripped of any markup while being saved.
That is an intersting idea I will play with.. so you're saying add one notificiation for "Welcome home Sara" and a 2nd for " How was your day" to follow right after, hope I got that right.
I tried adding a bunch of ,,,, or .... and with a ridiculous amount, I did notice some 'pause' or gap increase but it seemed like a very crude method, and thought there must be a way... just like adding 'pause' or 'wait' to numbers in your phone for extensions etc...
Had to do it in Rule 4.0 as the original 3.0 would allow multiple actions.
Also because I had a 3 second delay on the first one, to give her time to come through the door... I had to add 4 second delay to the 2nd, and so on.. so that they would go in the proper succession.
But it works well. Now I just wish I could have it inject a random joke at the end of each day... to mix it up a bit.
Actually, you can add a random joke. Type in a bunch of jokes as the notification text separated by a semicolon and then place a check in the box "Random". It will cause a random line to be pulled from the notification text. Sure, they'll get stale after awhile, but I don't think there's a limit in the amount of replies you can have there.
Like your first inclination I find myself wishing I could throw in a " / " to force a deliberate break in the speaking cadence just the way you tried "....."
I see the separate line solution but, I like the idea of a simple character insertion to force a pause.
Not only is is a matter of creating natural speaking pauses, but I find a lot of times I am throwing in extra words in sentences so that the whole progression of the announcement leaves enough time to hear and digest the key parts, e.g. states/variables/information.
Not sure if this is what you are looking for but this is how I place pauses of various lengths between statements when using Echo Speaks. Not sure if this can be done directly in RM so what I do is to use virtual switches in RM to trigger the Echo Speaks child app that makes the announcements, complete with any pauses. Nice thing about this is that you can indicate the precise length of each of the pauses. In my use case, I use it to provide a “countdown” to arm for when I arm my security system, as well as for anytime I want a couple of announcements with a slight delay in between them to make it easier to understand. My post that is link is long as it also addresses some additional questions (the delay between words or phrases part is towards the bottom of the post). Note the special character that needs to be used to delineate the pause. The thread itself is also a good read but addresses several other issues regarding Echo Speaks as well:
Hope this helps. Good luck.
(Note: the reason I don’t just put my pauses directly into RM between Echo Speaks announcements as some others may suggest is that I do not wish to hear a “ding” notice between each phrase).
Thanks I will look into that. I am using RM and Sonos but that might give me some ideas. With RM and delays it sometimes will work. It will speak the first phrase delay then the second phrase, other times it will speak the second phrase early while the first is ongoing and then repeat the first phrase.
but I want to insert like a 1/2 second pause to slow the cadence of the message and make it flow nicer.
