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I'm so confused between the text to speech technologies in Windows. I have a slightly peculiar requirement: I need to output speech from a .net program running in Win 7 using System.Speech assembly. I want a good, robotic sounding voice that doesn't have as strong a US accent as Microsoft Anna.

Which 3rd party voices will work with the .net api? Does anyone know of a good British (but not too British) voice, preferably free or cheap?

Stephen Ellis
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    Drive-by downvoters care to comment? – bic May 14 '12 at 19:38
  • Yeah, I see no reason to down-vote this question unless they wanted to criticize it for being non-development related? – Ani May 14 '12 at 19:55
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    Wow, just wow. Off-topic? Man I'm getting sick of the overly elite nature of SO. – bic May 14 '12 at 20:10
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    Yes. I don't really see how this doesn't meet the FAQ requirements, though I could have 'coded' it up I suppose. – Stephen Ellis May 16 '12 at 16:04
  • I'm coding using the `System.Speech.SpeechSynthesizer` class and I found this question entirely relevant to the topic of programming. +1 – Michael Earls Nov 29 '16 at 16:25

1 Answers1

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I believe the current TTS engine uses SAPI5 voices. I have not played with TTS beyond SAPI4, but some searching for "SAPI5 voices" produced relevant links. Perhaps this can take you further and actually find the voice you're looking for?

  1. http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/
  2. http://www.cepstral.com/demos/ - some commercial voices

Hope this helps!

Ani
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