Resolved by CochranRobotics!
Hey guys.
I have asked this question in another thread, but I decided to create a new "assistance required" thread as my issue relates to Windows 8, where as the other thread was really related to Windows 7, plus I'm still having problems. I really hope someone can help with this.
The issue
I'm in the middle of a transition from moving from a Win 7 to Win 8 laptop, and I'm having a real pain in the butt issue using speech synthesis voices with the new Windows 8 machine and new ARC install.
As Richard may remember, I mentioned in the other thread that I copied the .exe file for a Cepstral voice from my Win 7 machine, reinstalled it on to the Win 8 laptop, and added the activation key. The voice worked on Narrator and other 3rd party apps such as screen readers, but it never worked on ARC so I thought that was the problem. I have since reset the laptop back to the "Out of the box" state, and started again.
My new Windows 8 Toshiba Satellite laptop comes with three pre-installed voices, but only one of them works with ARC. I have installed a fresh version of a trial Cepstral voice and a 30 day trial of an Ivona voice, and neither one works with ARC either.
I have tried each and every variation of the "Speech synthesis" settings for each voice and they have made no difference whatsoever, and keeps using the one Windows voice. The only thing that does change is the "Rate".
Have any of you guy's faced this issue with Windows 8, and/or does anyone know what can be done so I can use the voices I want to use? I really want to get this working and I don't see why I'm having these problems, as using Cepstral with ARC on Windows 7 was no problem at all. Please help. confused
Many thanks.
Steve.
Let me look to see what is possible there.
Thanks David.
I cant find a supported method of doing this. now to look at hacks to make this happen.
This is purely up to you and I don't know what the results will be, but here it goes. I take no responsibility if things break so think about it before you do it. If you are looking at an OS rebuild anyway, it wouldn't hurt to try.
BEFORE YOU DO THIS, I would make a backup of your registery. REBOOT IN SAFEMODE to give you the ability to change this I suspect.
In the registry under Hkey_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\speech\voices\tokens there are the voices that I have installed.
TTS_MS_EN-GB_HAZEL_11.0 could be deleted to see if that causes the others to work. I would also check to see if there are any of the old voices listed in there and remove them.
Also, the Hazel voice is stored in C:\Windows\Speech\Engines\TTS\en-GB
you could rename this directory to C:\Windows\Speech\Engines\TTS\en-GB_Backup
Reboot your machine and keep your fingers crossed.
I've got a win 8 system I can try this on wish me luck.
@David.
Well thanks a bunch. Now I've gone and broken everything now. Only joking. As you can tell by the banter, I have had some interesting results. Here they are...
I was unable to delete MS Hazel from the registry as it came up with an error. So I went via C:\Windows\Speech\Engines\TTS\en-GB and deleted the entire file. I then went to "Control Panel", "Speech Recognition" then "Text to Speech" to see if I did break anything. Hazel was still there but didn't work anymore. I had sent her packing. I then tried Heera and Zira. Phew, they were still working. So I then opened a new ARC project to see if everything was working there. I tried Heera and Zira and..... THEY WORKED
. I could change them in the Speech synthesis setting and the spoke with there corresponding voice. So next test.
I downloaded Cepstral trial and Ivona trial. Again they worked in Windows so tried ARC again, but would you believe it..... THEY WORKED TOO.
So, after 110 posts and a lot of head scratching, what I originally had a feeling about actually got scorching results. I'm going to try this again now on my main (new) Acer laptop but I can't see me having any issues, I hope. I'll leave an update in a bit.
That is great. so..... in thinking about this.....
Hazel was a GB voice. The others are US voices. I wonder if the GB voice was having issues due to globalization. It is interesting that the others started working. It is also good news.
Hmmmmm.... Hazel, that bi**h! Good riddance...