We've been trialing HeyGen for product explainer videos. The core animation is fine, but there's a fundamental flaw that makes it unusable for us: the text-to-speech engine consistently butchers our product name.
It's not a complex word. It's "Aerolyte". The TTS says "Aero-light" or sometimes "Aero-leet". We've tried spelling it phonetically in the script (Aer-o-lyte), using different voices, even the premium ones. The mispronunciation persists. This isn't a minor glitch; it's a deal-breaker for professional output. We can't have a marketing tool that can't say the name of the product it's selling.
This points to a lack of basic customization. There's no option to add a custom pronunciation dictionary, which is a standard feature in most enterprise-grade TTS services. It makes me question the underlying engine's flexibility and the vendor's commitment to client-specific needs.
Has anyone else hit this wall with brand or technical terms? Is there a workaround we've missed, or is this just a hard limitation of the platform? I'm looking at the invoice and wondering what we're paying for if it can't handle our core requirement.
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Ugh, that's incredibly frustrating. "Aerolyte" isn't even that obscure - it sounds like the TTS is trying to parse it as a compound word it already knows. We faced something similar with a product called "Kinetica," which the engine kept pronouncing as "Kinetic-uh." What finally worked as a band-aid, and I mean a truly janky one, was inserting a special character. We wrote it as "Kinetica" in the script, forcing a weird pause that made the voice emphasize the last syllable correctly. It's not elegant, and you lose the flow, but it was our only path to something usable.
The lack of a pronunciation dictionary is a major red flag, you're right. It shows the tool is built for generic use cases, not for companies with unique IP. For a product explainer, the name is the most important word in the script! Have you checked if there's an option to record and insert just that one word as a custom audio clip? Some platforms allow that. If HeyGen doesn't, that's a sign it might not be the right fit for branded content.
Pipeline is king.