Windows 7 Narrator Voice

Question

Is there any way that I can get Windows 7 to use a different narrator voice? I have one that I would like to purchase from Cepstral.com.

Antron007 · Answer

There'a a thread where Rich helped me out with this https://synthiam.com/Community/Questions/3771 I had to DL the Speech SDK from Microsoft to get other voices. I only have other MS voices so far but Rich I believe, is using voices he purchased somewhere.

Rich · Answer

yes, I am using a voice I purchased from Cereproc. Setting up in ARC is simple, you don't need to change any windows settings just add the voice synth. settings control and select from the drop downs. You may need to play around with the options of adult/child, male/female etc. but they do work. I think some others use cepstral voices with success too.

rgordon · Answer

I downloaded the Cepstral demo voice "David". Then downloaded and installed the the Speech SDK from Microsoft that Antron007 mentioned. Then rebooted. Then did as Rich said and started ARC and added the voice synth. control. When I clicked on the drop down box , the Cepstral David demo voice was there! It sounds great. It has a license message that is inserted into every other phrase that it speaks until I actually purchase it. But this proves the test. Thanks guys! You made my day!

Tymtravler · Answer

Yep I got Williams voice and added the Old Robot effect, it sounds great.

Antron007 · Answer

I'm glad I could help. I still haven't played with my voices yet but I will be posting a project in the next few days. My former bot met it's end and was harvested. I need arms and some more controls and coding and I'll be posting it. Voice is one of those things.

rgordon · Answer

I purchased the Lawrence voice. It was $35. The only bad thing is EZ-Robot won't let me use the special effect for "Old Robot". It just uses his normal voice. Which I guess will be OK. @Rich....His voice is UK English accent. Wanted him to sound kinda like Jarvis from Ironman movie

Rich · Answer

Yeah, I downloaded Lawrence demo for Melvin since he needs a different voice to Jarvis (who uses Ceraproc William and sounds really cool). I don't have the old robot effect on, I don't even know if I can use it or not, I assume not but then I want mine to sound more human like anyway The voices may sound expensive at $35 (I think mine was around 40 so $60) but if you think about it, that's the same a a couple of good servos and in the grand scheme of it hardly anything if you add up the cost of building a robot (I stopped counting on Melvin a long time ago when I spent 3 time the original budget)

rgordon · Answer

Yeah, budget kinda went out the window on mine. I think the price is very reasonable. It bums me out that I wont be able to get the old robot voice effect to work with ARC. It is a really cool effect. Also the gentleman I was speaking to at Cepsrtal pointed me to a beta test site where you can further modify your Cepstral voice settings, but I have not tried it yet. Here is the link: cepstral.com/demos/sfx/rack Now I am busy building a database of robot phrases to choose from to use at the Maker Fair Saturday. I'm going to meet Josh there and help out with the EZ Robot Booth. We are going to try and drum up some business for DJ.

Antron007 · Answer

I couldn't get any voices to work with ARC. The cepstral demos didn't work for me either not even in/for windows. I have all kinds of voices in my lists but only Anna speaks. I guess I'll live with that until I figure something out. If I got a different voice program, will it work with ARC. Say I got dragon or TrueVoice, would ARC.use that instead of windows native speech? @rgordon - Good luck to you and Josh at Maker Fair.

rgordon · Answer

The Cepstral voice works with ARC but ARC does not let me use the special effect that would make the voice sound more "robotic". The voice is also available now under my Windows 7 Narrator as one of the voices I can choose. Antron007, what Windows version are you using? Cause when I downloaded and installed the the Speech SDK from Microsoft that you pointed me to earlier and then rebooted, the voice is now available in ARC and in Windows 7.

Antron007 · Answer

@rgordon Win7Pro 32bit.

Tymtravler · Answer

@rgordon I can send you the voices, what's your email

rgordon · Answer

@Antron007 I'm using Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit Full. I downloaded what you mentioned in this thread post #9 which I pasted here below: "https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5e86ec97-40a7-453f-b0ee-6583171b4530 I downloaded the SDK (SpeechSDK51.exe) and I also downloadedl the XP Voices (Sp5TTIntXP.exe) A few notes.. The SKD doesn't unzip into a subfolder like alot of zip.exes do so make sure you unzip it to an empty folder if you don't want them mixed up with other files. I unzipped the Voices to the default location and then copied Sp5TTIntXP.Msm into C:\Windows\Speech\Engines and I have some voices now." After I did this, my voice from Cepstral works in Windows and in ARC. However, the weird thing was when trying to use it in ARC I had to config the voice for: Lawrence Male Child Then the voice worked correctly. Don't know why it had to be set as [child] @Tymtravler Thanks but I ended up ordering the Cepstral voice Lawrence for $35. It sounds great.

Rich · Answer

If I don't set the correct options (in my case, William, Male, Adult) it defaults back to Anna. You do have to play with those settings with some voices to get them to work.

Antron007 · Answer

@BothOfUHelping me. Thanks for the info. Maybe I missed some settings but if I select any of them as female it defaults to Anna and if I use a male voice I get the "blah"s. Ill fiddle with it when I get home. Thanks again.

Tymtravler · Answer

Hey no problem rgordon, I also wanted the old robot sound from Cepstral but it would not work. I got Cepstral's tech support to email me the files to make the voice have the effects.

rgordon · Answer

@Antron007 Yeah, mine just said "blah blah" until I set the config in ARC for "child" instead of "adult". Then and only then did I get the Lawrence voice to work. I had to set it to "child" but it does not mean it sounds like a child. It is now the correct voice. Let me know if this works for you

rgordon · Answer

@Tymtravler So all you had to do was ask Cepstral to change it so it defaults as the voice plus the "old robot" sound? Did they want more $ to do this?

rgordon · Answer

bump

Antron007 · Answer

@rgordon. I messed with my settings some More and no luck. I have a Bunch of voices from various sources so I'm going to uninstall them and start from scratch.

Tymtravler · Answer

@rgordon No it did not cost me anything extra for the effects. They sent me the files for like Old robot, PVC pipe, ect. I can email u the files and the instructions on how and where to install the files. I have William with old robot and it sounds great. Remindes me of Sherman on Millennium.

rgordon · Answer

@Tymtravler I went to the Cepstral support link. - Clicked on "Personal" - Chose my OS which is Windows -Clicked on "Learn More" -Clicked on "How do I customize my voice?" There it gave instructions (unclear instructions) on how to get the soundfx to work with other applications. Here is a copy of what it says: "Using Special Effects A final way to set effects globally (so you can hear them within other applications) is to save the individual parameters in a text file called 'default.sfx' and save that in the voice's data directory. On Mac OS X, the voice data directory (with David, for example) is typically at: /Library/Speech/Voices/David.SpeechVoice/Contents/Resources/default.sfx On Microsoft Windows, it's typically at: C:\Program Files\Cepstral\voices\David\default.sfx On Linux platforms, it's typically at: /opt/swift/voices/David/default.sfx The voice will automatically use the SFX file when it speaks. If you want to use the sfx files that come with our voices, you can find these in the sfx directory of your voice. Copy these to your default.sfx file to achieve the desired results. If you're an audiophile and feel comfortable in a virtual rack environment, feel free to use our SpeechFX Rack to create SFX files that Swift can use." At first I could not figure out what they meant about "save the individual parameters in a text file called 'default.sfx' and save that in the voice's data directory.". ?...?..? confused I drilled down through the folders under my Cepstral folder and found the SFX folder they were talking about. Then I copied the "old_robot.sfx" file and pasted into my folder called Lawrence. Then I changed the file name from "old_robot.sfx" to "default.sfx" . Then when I opened ARC my voice for Lawrence and it had the old robot effect. It sounds great. BTW all the different sound effects for the voice are located in the SFX folder for you to choose from.

rgordon · Answer

@Antron007 I'm not sure what's going on with your setup....maybe Rich can help. So in ARC you tried your robots voice using the setting called "child" instead of "adult" right? That was the only way to make mine stop saying "BLAH BLAH" every time I tried to use it. Even though it is selected as "child" it still sounds as an "adult". confused

Antron007 · Answer

Yes I've tried almost every combination of the properties. Just out of curiosity, what are your other settings? Emphasis, rate, ect..? Thanks.

rgordon · Answer

Voice = Cepstral Lawrence Gender = Male Age = Child Emphasis = Moderate Rate = Medium Volume = 100

Rich · Answer

Set the voice you want as the default voice in Windows control panel. Try every combination of the settings you can try, including changing the voice itself. Some voices need settings that may not look correct. My Windows 8 PC needs different settings set to my Windows 7 PC too, which I can't quite figure out why that is but I'll blame it on Microsoft. I'll read through the whole topic tomorrow and see if I can spot anything that's not quite right, I should have been asleep 40 minutes go so can't do it now

rgordon · Answer

@Antron007 Did you copy the file Sp5TTIntXP.Msm into C:\Windows\Speech\Engines folder? Then you re-booted. Correct? What voice are you trying to use? Where did you get it? What I just found out by testing was that Microsoft Mike and Microsoft Mary show up in my ARC voice list but they do not work. Only Microsoft Anna and the voice I got from Cepstral work. Microsoft Anna works with any of the combination of settings except "Gender"= Male Cepstral Lawrence only works when I set "Gender"= Male and "Age" can bet set to anything except Adult. If I set it to adult it goes BLAH BLAH.

Antron007 · Answer

OK all I did was load up the Cepstral Speech tool and run the test message then I loaded ARC to start hacking away at the settings and some how Diane and David work now. I have it set to David and if I have it on any gender but female it will be David. If I select female it will be Diane. Only exception is that if I have gender to not set and age to not set it will play nothing but if I don't set the gender but set any age it will be David. I did not set any of them as my windows voice unless the Cepstral program did it behind the scenes some how because Windows says I'm using Anna. I wish I could explain what happened to make them work now. After I got it working I used the default.sfx method above and David is rocking old-robot as well. Thanks for all the help.

rgordon · Answer

Yay! Congrats!

Tymtravler · Answer

@rgordon Wow glad it now works, when I called tech support they did say they where going to setup a how to change the effects page because that was not there when I needed it. They just sent me the instruction and files. I like William with the old robot effect, just enough effect but clear enough to understand.

Steve G · Answer

@ Cepstral voice users. Hey guys. So, I have a Windows 7 laptop with a Cepstal voice installed. A while ago I configured the laptop to use the effects following @rgordons tutorial in post #15 and it's been working great with my ARC project. Here's my problem though. I just purchased another laptop running Windows 8 and has three default voices installed. I copied the Cepstral voice over and configured the effects again, and the Windows text to speech is now using it. But when I try to use it in ARC, it only uses one of the default voices. I have tried every configuration I can in the speech settings, but the voice does not change (except "rate" ) and even changing the voice to one of the other default voices makes no difference. Any ideas on what else I need to do guys? confused confused

Dunning-Kruger · Answer

Have you tried rebooting then a fresh download and re-install ARC?

Steve G · Answer

@Richard. Yeah I did try a reboot a couple of times but no joy. I havn't however tried an ARC reinstall. I'll try it now. Cheers.

Steve G · Answer

Well I just re-installed ARC, no change. It's still using the same default voice as before no matter what voice I select, whether it's Cepstral or the other two default voices, or changing the speech settings.

Dunning-Kruger · Answer

When you said you copied over the Cepstal voice did you just copy the files into their directories or did you use a self extracting windows installer file?

Steve G · Answer

I have done a Windows Easy transfer which contained the .exe file. I installed the voice and Cepstral tools, and entered the activation key. Do you think I have missed something doing it this way?

Dunning-Kruger · Answer

I am stumped... sounds like it should work Steve... Hmmmm

Steve G · Answer

Yeah, it is a strange one. Like I said, the voice and effect works with Windows and a third party screen reader app, just not with ARC. Weird. confused confused

rgordon

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