Can I change the way it says the word 'two'?

[raydleemsc]

In many phrases and comments, the speech engine reduces the more natural 'two' to the abbreviated 't-'. There are a few cases where 'to' can be shortened to 't-', but the speech engine mistakenly does this with the number in the middle of other sentences and even with the hyperbole 'too' in some instances.

Is there some way of localising my instance to over-ride the pronunciation so that this is less jarring on the perceptive ear?

[Pfeil]

If you're using a default Microsoft TTS voice like "David" or "Zira", you should be able to use SSML to override the pronunciation, though this does mean you need SSML tags in each action you want it to apply to.

There is some information on SSML use here(the "Guide the pronunciation of specific words" section should be relevant).
Once you have the pronunciation you want, you could create a .pls lexicon file, which when referenced will apply it to any occurrence of the word between the SSML tags, rather than having to so manually for each one individually.

[Exergist]

You can also create a custom entry for the word 'two' in the Windows Speech Dictionary. You then have the option to pronounce the word as you would like. Bear in mind that this will globally impact how all TTS outputs this word as well as how Windows Speech Recognition (and therefore VA) recognize the word when you say it.

[Mike308]

Another trick is to simply spell "two" phoenetically different, depending on what aspect of it strikes your ear as funny. It doesn't matter if the written word looks odd, what matters is pronunciation. I recently had an issue with "wrath" (which I wanted to rhyme with "bath" but instead rhymed with "froth") - so I just edited the word to "rath" and it sounded perfect. Sometimes, experimenting with spellings or with punctuation (like commas) can give you different results.

[Exergist]

I recently had an issue with "wrath" (which I wanted to rhyme with "bath" but instead rhymed with "froth") - so I just edited the word to "rath" and it sounded perfect.

For additional detail - this works because by default the speech engine interprets "rath" as (using SAPI phones) "r ae th," which indeed rhymes with "bath." For Mike308's case the speech engine was outputting "wrath" as (again with SAPI phones) "r ao th," which rhymes with "froth."

When you provide custom word entries to the Speech Dictionary (see my previous post) you are telling/forcing the dictionary to associate a different pronunciation for a given word. The nuts and bolts of it is that the speech engine can use your voice input to adjust the phones associated with the word of interest (default "r ae th" can become "r ao th" and vice-versa or whatever else you might want).