SpeakOn is self-voicing and is available in English only. It is installed with the eSpeak synthesizer which speaks by default. In addition SpeakOn provides access to Microsoft Speech API version 5 (SAPI5) and Microsoft Speech Platform (MSP).
The eSpeak synthesizer is installed together with SpeakOn and a variety of English voices are available.
With SAPI5, SpeakOn relies on SAPI5 voices already existing on your computer. SpeakOn does not come with any voices itself.
Microsoft Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 come with a SAPI5 voice installed as standard.
If accessible products are installed on your computer, it is probable that these include additional SAPI5 voices which would be available for SpeakOn to use.
You can check which SAPI5 voices you have already on your system by looking at the Control Panel folder > Speech settings. Switch to the 'Text to speech' tab and you are presented with a combo box which contains the voices installed on your system.
Some SAPI5 voices are available for free to download from the internet but in general, high quality voices need to be purchased.
MSP voices are only available for Windows Seven and Eight. A variety of English voices are available from the Microsoft website.
To use these voices, you will need to install two components:
Microsoft Speech Platform - Runtime Version 11, x86
Note that at the time of writing this manual you must install the x86 version even if your system is 64-bit, otherwise you will get an error when trying to select this synthesizer.
Microsoft Speech Platform - Runtime Languages Version 11
This page includes many files for both speech recognition and text-to- speech. Choose the files containing the TTS data for the desired English voices. For example, the file MSSpeech_TTS_en- US_ZiraPro.msi is a U.S. English voice. You do not need to install the MSSpeech_SR MSI files, as these are not voices but rather they are for speech recognition.
Please note that SAPI5 and MSP voices are installed to the Windows operating system, not to SpeakOn itself. Please make sure that SpeakOn is not running during the voice installation.
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