Encoding parameter is necessary for Spanish and other languages

[almudenaftourne]

While testing the docs code with Spanish I noticed encoding is necessary for voices to pronounce certain letters correctly (like 'ñ', which is very common in the Spanish language). If not, it misspells the word completely.

There is a note on the "Use SSML to customize speech characteristics" section where it is explained how to read using SSML configuration, but it only mentions encoding for this specific case:

_If your ssmlstring contains  at the beginning of the string, you need to strip off the BOM format or the service will return an error. You do this by setting the encoding parameter as follows: open("ssml.xml", "r", encoding="utf-8-sig").

I was able to fix the Spanish pronuntiation by adding the encoding specification:

ssml_string = open("ssml-spanish-v2.xml", "r", encoding='utf-8').read()
result = synthesizer.speak_ssml_async(ssml_string).get()

I think it would be helpful to clarify this in the docs as most languages have specific characteris like 'ñ' or "¨" that otherwise won't be pronounced correctly.

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Document Details

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• ID: 3a010d36-e5df-8f34-8c91-b2335208a496
• Version Independent ID: 58a0d8bf-1687-7fd7-d990-b9f768507a6c
• Content: How to synthesize speech from text - Speech service - Azure Cognitive Services
• Content Source: articles/cognitive-services/Speech-Service/how-to-speech-synthesis.md
• Service: cognitive-services
• Sub-service: speech-service
• GitHub Login: @eric-urban
• Microsoft Alias: eur

[YutongTie-MSFT]

Thanks for the feedback! We are currently investigating and will update you shortly.

[YutongTie-MSFT]

@almudenaftourne Thanks a lot for pointing this out, I have reached out to the author for making it clear.

[eric-urban]

@almudenaftourne - Thank you for taking the time to point this out! I've opened an internal work item to track this to completion. We can add more details to the SSML document and/or update the current how to synthesize page.

[eric-urban]

please-close

[yulin-li]

Hi @almudenaftourne , what's the encoding of your ssml-spanish-v2.xml file? Could you share this file with us for further investigating?