Hazbot
Australia
Asked
— Edited
Does anyone - and I mean anyone out there - know how to change the MS windows 7 voice of Anna. I've got a handle on the rss feeds but this girls voice drives me nuts.
Besides Bob is a man, bloke, fella, guy - You know he eats hot dog batteries and watches the footy with those wacky disc eyes. He is getting traumatized when he heres me practicing rss feeds next to him. He's probably thinking " Oh my God - Hazza is going to give me a brain with that shocking electronic female voice".
Now I've checked around the web but there doesn't seem to be a lot on offer. There are 2 male voices but there's no real good instruction on how to get them into the speech recognition part of windows. Can someone help - DJ, anyone - Pleeeeease 
As far as I know, it is the only voice you can use except if you Purchase a 3rd party voice. Make sure they say it is compatible with win7.
This is a little trick from Microsoft to play on us.
You can also ask Fred (Robotmaker) , I think he experimented, but I don't know about win7. I think he used XP.
Mel
P.S. I am sure that Microsoft has had plenty of complains about this. So, you might wait for win8 and that may be better.
I actually changed the gender of my robot because I couldn't change the voice. This is a Microsoft issue not EZB.
Hi MM - I understand it's nothing to do with EZB - I thought someone in our forum could help but like the intermediate development of Robots at present (not just this site but everywhere) there's no easy straight forward solutions which is what I'm always looking for. It appears MS rules the genders. Windows 8 should have something more unisex.
I haven't found an answer to that yet. Sorry I could not help you on that one.
If you load the Speech Settings, and press the question mark, you'll get this page: https://synthiam.com/Tutorials/Help.aspx?id=156
There is a link to other voices by a company - mind you, they are expensive but free for personal use. The personal use free version has an advertisement every time you start it.
Thanks DJ, I'll give it a try..
I've been messing around with this issue as well, I'm using win7 ultimate 32bit; Anna's voice reminds me of a b_tchy receptionist lol
I found a text to speech frontend called 2nd speech. It uses sapi 4 and 5 voices, and can be set up to watch the clipboard to read whatever you highlight. Problem is, the voices still don't get added to the windows text to speech settings, so you still can't use these voices in ARC. It has one really awesome feature though, It can be set up to record whatever it says into an mp3 file...so you can set up a bunch of phrases and load them into your soundboard or mp3 trigger. It kinda defeats the purpose if your robot is reading rss feeds though 
Nice discovery KQ.. I might try that one and experiment with the mp3 feature
