Add your own English words
Dutch text at work is full of English terms. This is how you stop a local voice from mangling the ones it does not know.
A Dutch Piper voice reads English words the Dutch way. Without help, request comes out as "rayk-vest" and deadline as "day-ahd-lee-nuh". Speakybara ships with a list of common English words and looks up their sounds in the English rule book instead, then hands both to the same voice.
You keep one speaker and one natural sentence melody; only the pronunciation of those words changes. This applies to Piper only. The Edge and Google voices read English words correctly by themselves, so the option is switched off for them.
Adding a word
Step 1
Open the list from settings
In Settings, under Languages, the row Say English words in Dutch text the English way has a small link: Open english-words.txt. It opens the file in your default text editor.
The switch for English words in Dutch text, with the link to english-words.txt next to it. Screens come from the app itself.
Step 2
Add your terms, one per line
Write the word as you would type it, lower case, one per line. Product names, tooling, jargon from your field: anything a Dutch voice would otherwise read letter by letter in Dutch.
Step 3
Save the file
Speakybara notices the change and reloads the list by itself. There is no restart, no reload button and nothing to confirm.
Step 4
Listen to the same text again
Press Ctrl+Alt+R to read the last text again, or shoot the same frame once more. The word now comes out with English sounds, spoken by the same Dutch voice.
Worth knowing
- Eleven English sounds do not exist in Dutch, so the voice never learned them. They are replaced by the nearest Dutch sound: the English r becomes a Dutch r, th becomes t or d. Roughly what a Dutch speaker does when reading an English word aloud.
- Dutch words that look English are left alone: brand, post, model, test, band, camera and export stay Dutch.
- The whole feature can be switched off with the checkbox above the link, if you would rather have everything read the Dutch way.
- The file lives in the Speakybara folder next to your settings, so it is easy to back up or copy to another PC.
If something goes wrong
No, and it does not need to. Those voices already pronounce English words correctly inside a Dutch sentence, so Speakybara switches the option off when you select them. The list only affects the local Piper voices.
No. The file is watched and reloaded automatically. If the word still sounds wrong, check that it is on its own line and spelled the way it appears in the text.
Remove that word from english-words.txt and save. The built-in list deliberately leaves Dutch look-alikes such as brand, post, model and export in Dutch, so anything unexpected is usually a line you added.