If you’re playing around with TTS–in RadioDJ or any other Windows program–you might find that the pre-installed system voice on your computer leaves much to be desired. The instructions I’m about to give are a bit of a hack and only complete to the point in which I got it to work for the purpose I had in mind. I’ve gotten this little hack to work in Vista 32 and 7 64-bit versions…
First, seek out and install Microsoft Speech Server 11.0 x86 [aka Microsoft Speech Platform – Runtime (Version 11)].
Second, get and install the voices for Speech Server 11.0 [Microsoft Speech Platform – Runtime Languages (Version 11)].
Third–the fun part–open regedit and export the “Tokens” for the newly installed voices. Depending upon your version of windows, you’ll find the voices referenced under one or both of the following:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech Server\v11.0\Voices
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Speech Server\v11.0\Voices
…if you’ve found them, right-click and export the “Tokens” folder to a file — say, something like voices1.reg and voices2.reg, respectively.
Edit those exported entries with your favorite text-editor, replacing the instances of \Speech Server\v11.0\ with \Speech\ . When you’re done, save, and then import the entries back into the registry (double-clicking will suffice).
You may want to reboot the machine–I didn’t have to on one, but did on the other.
After all that’s done, all you have to do is change your computer’s default voice–c’est voila!–no more Microsoft Anna!
Personally, the voice I like the sound of Zira Pro.
…and for the RadioDJ user, don’t forget–if you’re using the AutoDJ TTS feature–the voice number referenced in the XML files begins numbering at 0, and will go in order that it appears in the TTS plugin’s drop-down voice list.
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