Change default rate to 1.25

packages/text-to-speech/data/ssml.xml

@@ -1,36 +0,0 @@
-<speak xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/10/synthesis" version="1.0" xml:lang="en-US"><voice name="en-US-JennyNeural"><prosody rate="1" pitch="default">
-    <p><bookmark mark="5" />Back in 2010, during my first year of Business School, I helped give a presentation entitled “Twitter 101”:</p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="8" />My section was “The Twitter Value Proposition”, and after admitting that yes, you can find out what people are eating for lunch on Twitter, I stated “The truth is you can find anything you want on Twitter, and that’s a good thing.” The Twitter value proposition was that you could “See exactly what you need to see, in real-time, in one place, and nothing more”; I illustrated this by showing people how they could unfollow me:</p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="11" />The point was that Twitter required active management of your feed, but if you put in the effort, you could get something uniquely interesting to you that was incredibly valuable.</p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="12" />Most of the audience didn’t take me up on it.</p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="13" />Facebook Versus Instagram</p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="14" />If there is one axiom that governs the consumer Internet — consumer anything, really — it is that convenience matters more than anything. That was the problem with Twitter: it just wasn’t convenient for nearly enough people to figure out how to follow the right people. It was Facebook, which digitized offline relationships, that dominated the social media space.</p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="15" />Facebook’s social graph was the ultimate growth hack: from the moment you created an account Facebook worked assiduously to connect you with everyone you knew or wish you knew from high school, college, your hometown, workplace, you name an offline network and Facebook digitized it. Of course this meant that there were far too many updates and photos to keep track of, so Facebook ranked them, and presented them in a feed that you could scroll endlessly.</p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="16" />Users, famously, hated the News Feed when it was first launched: Facebook had protesters outside their doors in Palo Alto when it was introduced, and far more online; most were, ironically enough, organized on Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg <bookmark mark="17" />penned an apology:</p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="19" />
-        We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now…
-    </p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="20" />The errors to be corrected were better controls over what might be shared; Facebook did not give the users what they claimed to want, which was abolishing the News Feed completely. That’s because the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — <bookmark mark="20" />no News Feed — <bookmark mark="20" />and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right.</p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="21" />It was hard to not think of that non-apology apology while watching <bookmark mark="22" />Adam Mosseri’s Instagram update<bookmark mark="21" /> three weeks ago; Mosseri was clear that videos were going to be an ever great part of the Instagram experience, along with recommended posts. Zuckerberg reiterated the point on <bookmark mark="23" />Facebook’s earnings call<bookmark mark="21" />, noting that recommended posts in both Facebook and Instagram would continue to increase. A day later <bookmark mark="24" />Mosseri told Casey Newton on Platformer<bookmark mark="21" /> that Instagram would scale back recommended posts, but was clear that the pullback was temporary:</p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="26" />
-        “When you discover something in your feed that you didn’t follow before, there should be a high bar — it should just be great,” Mosseri said. “You should be delighted to see it. And I don’t think that’s happening enough right now. So I think we need to take a step back, in terms of the percentage of feed that are recommendations, get better at ranking and recommendations, and then — if and when we do — we can start to grow again.” (“I’m confident we will,” he added.)
-    </p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="27" />Michael Mignano calls this recommendation media in an article entitled <bookmark mark="28" />The End of Social Media:</p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="30" />
-        In recommendation media, content is not distributed to networks of connected people as the primary means of distribution. Instead, the main mechanism for the distribution of content is through opaque, platform-defined algorithms that favor maximum attention and engagement from consumers. The exact type of attention these recommendations seek is always defined by the platform and often tailored specifically to the user who is consuming content. For example, if the platform determines that someone loves movies, that person will likely see a lot of movie related content because that’s what captures that person’s attention best. This means platforms can also decide what consumers won’t see, such as problematic or polarizing content.
-        <bookmark mark="31" />  It’s ultimately up to the platform to decide what type of content gets recommended, not the social graph of the person producing the content. In contrast to social media, recommendation media is not a competition based on popularity; instead, it is a competition based on the absolute best content. Through this lens, it’s no wonder why Kylie Jenner opposes this change; her more than 360 million followers are simply worth less in a version of media dominated by algorithms and not followers.
-    </p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="32" />Sam Lessin, a former Facebook executive, traced this evolution from the analog days to what is next in a <bookmark mark="33" />Twitter screenshot<bookmark mark="32" /> entitled “The Digital Media ‘Attention’ Food Chain in Progress”:</p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="36" />Lessin’s five steps:</p>
-    <p>
-        <bookmark mark="39" />The Pre-Internet ‘People Magazine’ Era
-        <bookmark mark="40" />Content from ‘your friends’ kills People Magazine
-        <bookmark mark="41" />Kardashians/Professional ‘friends’ kill real friends
-        <bookmark mark="42" />Algorithmic everyone kills Kardashians
-        <bookmark mark="43" />Next is pure-AI content which beats ‘algorithmic everyone’
-    </p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="44" />This is a meta observation and, to make a cheap play on words, the first reason why it made sense for Facebook to change its name: Facebook the app is eternally stuck on Step 2 in terms of entertainment (the app has evolved to become much more of a utility, with a focus on groups, marketplace, etc.). It’s Instagram that is barreling forward. I wrote last summer about <bookmark mark="45" />Instagram’s Evolution:</p>
-    <p><bookmark mark="47" />
-        The reality, though, is that this is what Instagram is best at. When Mosseri said that Instagram was no longer a photo-sharing app — particularly a “square photo-sharing app” — he was not making a forward-looking pronouncement, but simply stating what has been true for many years now. More broadly, Instagram from the very beginning — including under former CEO Kevin Systrom — has been marked first and foremost by evolution.
-    </p>
-</prosody></voice></speak>

packages/text-to-speech/src/htmlToSsml.ts

@@ -156,7 +156,7 @@ export type SSMLItem = {
 export type SSMLOptions = {
   primaryVoice: string
   secondaryVoice: string
-  rate: string
+  rate: number
   language: string
 }
 

packages/text-to-speech/src/textToSpeech.ts

@@ -134,7 +134,7 @@ export const synthesizeTextToSpeech = async (
       primaryVoice: input.voice || 'en-US-JennyNeural',
       secondaryVoice: input.complimentaryVoice || 'en-US-GuyNeural',
       language: input.language || 'en-US',
-      rate: '1.333',
+      rate: input.rate || 1.25,
     }
     if (textType === 'html') {
       const ssmlItems = htmlToSsmlItems(input.text, ssmlOptions)

packages/text-to-speech/test/htmlToSsml.test.ts

@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ describe('htmlToSsmlItems', () => {
     primaryVoice: 'test-primary',
     secondaryVoice: 'test-secondary',
     language: 'en-US',
-    rate: '1',
+    rate: 1,
   }
 
   describe('a simple html file', () => {