Dejal

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Feature Request: Groups, Favorite Characters

Apologies for spamming the forum, but after spending more time to experiment with Narrator, I've come across a few features that I think could be improved and/or added in future versions, and which I hope others may find useful.

One thing I would like to see would be a better way of organizing characters for complex projects that may involve large casts, such as lengthy stories, plays, or even novels. It would be nice to be able to group them into folders, or some sort of user-defined hierarchy so that they would be easier to access when assigning parts. For example, someone could divide characters by age or gender, or in my case, as I like to make variations of the same character to enhance expression, I could group those together into a folder to avoid confusion later on. The same could also be said of chapter divisions; for example, a novel with long chapters could be subdivided into scenes and grouped together, as with a play with acts and scenes.

Another feature I would appreciate, perhaps above all, would be a way to save "favorite" characters/voices in a kind of bank for easy access later on. This would be especially useful for someone who may work on separate documents that recycle the same voices, so that he/she wouldn't have to spend time to adjust the parameters again and run the risk of not getting it quite right the second time around. Since I like to work with many variations of the same character, i.e. adjusting pitch and rate, to express different emotions (well, as best as voice synthesis technology can), I would really like to see a way of saving the voices I like best and then being able to refer back to them later. In addition, a way of making variations of a voice by duplicating an existing voice and then tweaking it from there would also be extremely helpful.

Just a few suggestions from a humble new user. :) Thanks again for making Narrator a fun, easy-to-use, and innovative application! Keep up the great work.

David Sinclair's picture

Re: Feature Request: Groups, Favorite Characters

Groups of characters and actors is definitely a good idea. Something I considered, but decided to skip for now to keep things simple. But if I get requests for it, I'll consider adding that in a future version.

As for variations of characters for different moods etc, and saving favorite characters for multiple documents, those are also both features I considered when designing the version 2 upgrade, and have in fact added groundwork for adding in a future version. My idea was to have an "Actors" preference page, where you could set up a range of voice settings, then those would appear as options in the characters area, instead of the simple voices as now. I would also make the characters into groups, with "moods" below each for the voice variations. Again, I decided to skip that for 2.0 in the name of simplicity (and to get it out in a timely manor), but will likely implement in a future version.

Thanks for the suggestions. Feedback is always welcome!