Text Description

• SAYAS (container): define mode in which contained text is to be said.
  • MODE: description of mode (e.g. date, time, phone, currency ...) in which contained text is to be read
  • MODETYPE: secondary specification further qualifying MODE (e.g., date is read as day-month-year)
• DIV (container): classifies the contained region as a structural text type of type TYPE
  • TYPE: type of the division (e.g. sentence, paragraph)

As an instance of the SAYAS tag, consider the rendering of the date ``4/5/98'' via the U.S. versus non-U.S. methods. These two ways of expanding the string can be specified as:

<SAYAS MODE="date" MODETYPE="MDY">4/5/98</SAYAS>

and

<SAYAS MODE="date" MODETYPE="DMY">4/5/98</SAYAS>

respectively. Specifications of this kind are unavailable in other inline markup schemes (e.g. SAPI), but they are useful since they have the potential to reduce cross-synthesizer inconsistencies. That is, without SAYAS specifications of the kind specified above, one cannot control whether a new system will pronounce ``4/5/98'' as ``April 5, 1998'' or ``May 4, 1998''. The behavior for SABLE-compliant engines is, however, guaranteed.