How to make Alexa change how she reads custom text?

Question

1. In my routine I have Alexa speak a paragraph of text, just 2 sentences. One of them is question, but regardless whether I add a question mark or a period, she reads the the text with the same exact voice. I'd love to have her read the text as question, aka change her tone a bit. Is this possible?

2. She reads custom text way too fast, any way to slow it down?

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, you can't change how Alexa speaks in the "Say" action of a routine. This reddit thread seems to agree, saying that you might be able to use homonyms to fix incorrect pronunciations, but there's nothing there to change the speech rate or pitch.

Alexa skills can return SSML to change how the speech is generated, for example a skill could return the following to slow down some of the speech:

<speak>
    Hello.
    <prosody rate="slow">I am now speaking slowly.</prosody>
    And now I am speaking normally again.
    Is this cool?
</speak>

It's also worth noting that, in skill responses, the documentation states:

Alexa automatically handles normal punctuation, such as pausing after a period, or speaking a sentence ending in a question mark as a question.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like you can use SSML in a routine, so this isn't particularly useful to you. It is odd that question marks aren't respected, but again a normal skill would be able to support that. If it matters a lot to you, you could try to make a custom skill, but that would be much more involved. You might just have to accept the poor speech generation for now, sadly.