There's a quest, I believe in Elwynn Forest, where the characters is supposed to cry a bit so the quest reads "sniff", which makes VoiceOver read it as "asterisk sniff asterisk".

Is it possible to generate a "sniffing sound" instead?

great idea. I'm wondering if all asterisks are supposed to be sounds. If thats the case I could setup a pipeline to suggest sound fx candidates on the website. I'll look into this.