Follow-up to this thread - this is way more specific, so hopefully worthy of its own thread. I think wildcards are the best option for my skill level (basically none), and have gotten a good chunk of what I wanted to accomplish done with those.
An issue I've run into and can't seem to google my way out is making TTS pronounce acronyms in a sensible way. For example "PACU" (post-anesthesia care unit) is usually vocalized as "pack-you" but my TTS software likes to say things like "pace-uh". Or "PO" (latin abbreviation for 'by mouth') is vocalized by just saying the letters, but TTS says "Poe". Stuff like that.
When the TTS comes across a capitol letter with a space on either side, it just pronounces the letter, so I'd still lose things like "pack-you" but at least hearing it spell out "pee ay see you" would make sense, vs "pace-uh" which is gibberish and confusing at high playback speeds.
Best I've come up with so far is <([A-Z]{2})> on the Find side, but that's only spotting the two character terms like PO, and ignoring the longer ones... I'd hoped it would see PACU and detect PA, AC, and CU as three distinct sets of two that could cobbled into "P A C U".
Nothing I've done on the Replace side comes close to working. It either does nothing at all, or it'll do something like turn "PO" into <([A- Z]{2})>. Not sure if preserving the original characters is something A-Z is actually capable of - seems not, but I'm kind of an idiot with stuff like this, so any tips would be appreciated!
Thank you!
Just ran it and it worked beautifully!
Extra spaces are fine - the actual document can be ugly as sin, so long as it plays well audibly - and it does!
Online service called Speechify. Its basically a deepfake of a chunk of recorded speech combined with a text input. I can't change the pronunciation directly, but the different voice actors all have their own patterns. How they tackle acronyms or medical terminology is hit and miss. I try to cycle through them despite that though, since I'll start to lose focus listening to the same voice for too long.
Once this semester wraps up, I kinda want to give myself a crash course on regex. Even my newbie ass can see the crazy useful potential in knowing that stuff, especially in the medical field, cuz computer literacy is pretty horrific here (twice I've walked passed an office and looked in to see some department manager squinting at an Excel sheet, then punching some numbers into a calculator - a physical calculator, that they're holing in their hand like a god damned monkey - then typing some shit into Excel one index finger stroke at a time, squint, calculator, type, etc.... I die a little inside each time... Y U NO FORMULA?! Y U NO USE OTHER 8 FINGERS?!?!)
Check out this guide:
https://speechify.com/blog/how-to-customise-or-replace-text-and-change-the-pronunciation-of-words-in-voiceover/
Oh shit, look at that. I'll have to play with that - however, I think your find and replace solution will do the best work here. Planning on hitting entire textbooks at a time, so I can just have a quick fix-it nuke at the start of any assigned readings, then spend the rest of my time actually reading/listening. Customizing each one would be cleaner for sure, but yours will let me correct hundreds of different acronyms at a time - and even though people don't usually spell out "P A C U" when speaking it, hearing it spelled out will at least make sense, and that's enough to learn my objectives, nuke the next textbook, and repeat.