Choose Text-to-Speech Voice in Windows 10

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Internet is full of useful information and is considered the largest source of knowledge in the world. You can find information about anything if you know your way around search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. But most of this information is available in the text format and not everybody has time to read through all of it. What you can do instead is that you can use a text-to-speech (TTS) voice engine and make your PC read all the text out to you. Like many of the older versions of Windows, the latest Windows 10 also comes with two TTS voices pre-installed. Here is how you can choose which of these voices you want to use :

  1. Press the hotkey Win+I to open the Settings app. You can also click on the Start and then select Settings from the menu to open the Settings app.
  2. In the Settings app, select the Time and Language category.
  3. On the Time and Language screen, select Speech from the left-side menu.Windows 10 TTS Voice
  4. On the screen that shows up next, you can choose the one of the voices from under the Text-to-speech section. There are two voices that you can choose from – Microsoft Zira Mobile (a female voice) and Microsoft Mark Mobile (a male voice). Both of these voices have the US English accent.
  5. Once you have selected one of the TTS (text-to-speech) voices, you can change the voice reading speed and click on the Preview voice button to see how it sounds.
  6. Now you can install an app like ReadAloud and make your PC read websites, text and PDF documents for you using the selected TTS voice.

Microsoft Windows 10 comes with only two voice engines (Zira Mobile and Mark Mobile). But you can download some more voices from many free TTS voices (which may not be so good). One of the sources for downloading free Microsoft and LTS TTS voices is Zero2000. You can also purchase very high quality TTS voices for Windows from companies like Ivona, Cepstral or CereProc.

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3 comments

  1. There are 3 default voices to use but I can only get one and not the other 2. Can you recommend a good clear voice to download?

  2. When installing Ivona 2 – Emma, it’s not showing up in the list on the TTS options, just the Win10 defaults. However, if I force using the “old” control panel and go to the options there it shows up. I select the Emma voice, go back and start up a reader, it goes back the default Win10 voice. Obviously there’s no carry-over from pre-Win10 TTS APIs here, thus rendering any option other than the “free” voices from Microsoft unusable one the upgrade to Win10 is done (as yet).

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