System Voices

[dasadler]

I am using a text to speech (TTS) program and it uses the installed Windows voices (Zira desktop and David desktop). I am looking for other voices, though and I came across this MSFT website. It has bunch of voices associated with various languages.

My question is... if I download and install voices associated with languages other than English... Spanish, for example, will I still be able to use that voice in a TTS application to speak English words and phrases? Will the voice speak with an accent associated with that particular language? In other words, speak English phrases with a Spanish accent?

I am reluctant to mess with my system settings so I thought I would ask the collective wisdom here before I do anything drastic.

[Rudi]

Hi Don,

Although a text-to-speech application can be multilingual so the language is automatically detected, the voices however are simply individual programs within the app. They are programmed to interpret and dictate words in the language recognized. In other words, you cannot download a Spanish voice and have it read Italian or English, and in a multilingual app, you cannot make the Spanish language component read English text. Also, unless a voice is designed with a specific accent explicitly (ie: to dictate English text with a Spanish accent), I'll be frightfully worried if a TTS voice ever did that!

[dasadler]

Thanks Rudi,

My computer only has two voices... Zira Desktop and David Desktop... I was hoping to find some other free voices as it seems those are the only two English voices on my system.

[Jay Freedman]

I haven't used any other voices, but this site has been recommended elsewhere: http://www.zero2000.com/free-text-to-sp ... oices.html

[dasadler]

Thanks. Looks like a lot of voices. I did install one of the voices and I noticed there are some downloadable voice files that contain as many as 19 voices. Since they are all .exe files, I presume that they will act like the file I already downloaded... when I ran it, the voice was automatically installed somewhere. Although I cannot find where it was installed, it does appear in my TTS application and I can use it. Unfortunately there was no way to preview it before download so you have to install it to see if it is a voice you like.

I know that there are many voices I will not be interested in... like the robot voices. Does anyone know how to find the system voices on the computer and delete (or uninstall) the voices I do not want?

[HansV]

The voices take up very little disk space. I wouldn't bother removing them.