Pause or slow reading
Control the speaking pace by inserting space-dash sequences to create pauses in your assistant’s responses.
Overview
Why use pauses?
Although you can adjust the overall audio speed by changing the speech rate, you might want to slow down your assistant’s speaking pace only at specific points (e.g., when reading phone numbers).You can do this by instructing the LLM and generating text with space-dashes in between.
Basic pauses
Adding simple pauses
Use single dashes with spaces before and after to create short pauses:
Example of simple pauses
Longer pauses
Creating longer pauses
Sometimes you want to insert longer pauses into the speech. You can do this by using multiple dashes between words.
Example of longer pauses
Note: Multiple dashes with spaces in between create longer pauses than single dashes.
Practical use cases
Phone numbers
Postal codes
Account numbers
Dates and times
Prompt examples for different situations
Best practices
Recommended approach
Avoid common mistakes
What to avoid
Integrating pauses into your prompts
How to integrate pauses into your prompts
- Identify points where pauses would be helpful.
- Insert dashes with appropriate spaces.
- Test the pronunciation with audio checks.
- Adjust if there are too many or too few pauses.
- Document your decisions for future reference.
Example of a complete prompt
Testing and optimizing
Test your pauses
- Conduct audio tests and listen to the generated speech.
- Check the pauses: Are they too short, too long, or just right?
- Test understandability: Can customers clearly understand the information?
- Make adjustments by changing the number of dashes.
- Check for consistency: Are you using the same format everywhere?
Help and support
Contact support
Need help with speech control? Contact our support team.

