Transcription Guidelines for SGX 3
Numerals
Arabic numerals should be avoided since their pronunciation is unpredictable. You should spell out numerals as they are spoken. Thus 1701 should be written out as "seventeen oh one", "seventeen hundred and one", or "one thousand seven hundred and one", depending on how it was actually spoken in the audio.
Punctuation
Punctuation marks (periods, commas, hyphens at line breaks, etc.) are not required, and they add nothing to the animation (pauses are determined directly from the audio).
However, DO use punctuation where it is part of the correct spelling of the word, for example:
Apostrophes in contractions (English don’t, French c’est)
Hyphens in compounds, or special forms like French pronoun inversion (a-t-il)
By the same token, also include accents, umlauts, and other diacritical marks that are part of the correct spelling of the word (e.g., French très). Doing this will optimize the accuracy of pronunciation.
Acronyms
Acronyms should be written with dots or spaces to separate the letters:
A.B.C.
A. B. C.
A B C
These are all acceptable and are understood to be pronounced by saying the individual letters. Acronyms written without dots or spaces (e.g., ABC) will not be understood by our text processor and should be avoided.
Special Characters
Special characters, including [$ £ € & % # @ ¥ ₽ °] are not identified by our text processor. For best results they should be written out using the words that are heard in the audio, like "dollars", "and", "at", etc.
Spelling
Avoid unconventional spellings as much as possible.
Non-Words (Breath, Emotes, Grunts)
For non-word ejections such as grunts, you can use words you might find in a dictionary, such as "ugh". But the system can also pronounce non-dictionary words as long as they make phonetic sense. For example, spellings like "ah," "sh," "oh," "hm" and "aw" will be pronounced as they are spelled.
Letter Repetition
Avoid using repetition of letters to indicate the sustain of a word, as in "Oh noooooooooo!" Our system determines duration from the audio only, not from spelling.