Description

This is a tutorial to help those of you having issues with speech synthesis working within ARC on a Windows 8.1 computer. Hopefully this will help you whether you're a seasoned ARC user, or if your just starting out, and are facing issues with speech synthesis.

UPDATE: The fix outlined in this tutorial also works for Windows 10, where a similar issue occurs.

Step 1

It should be noted that this issue doesn't effect every Windows 8.1 or 10 user, as it seems to be limited to computers that have "Microsoft Hazel Desktop - English (Great Britain)" installed in the text to speech properties of Windows 8.1. In North America there has also been reports of MS David causing the same issue. In this case the en-US directory for the Microsoft David voice needs to be deleted which is the same process explained below.

This tutorial is focused to solve the problem of "MS Hazel" being the only voice heard when using EZ-Builder's speech synthesis, no matter what voice is selected or settings that are changed. These can be third party voices from companies such as Cepstral, Ivona, and Cereproc, and even Microsoft's own "MS Herra" and "MS Zira" voices. So before we begin please take note of the following...

DISCLAIMER: Although the following information are not Registry changes, you will effectively be deleting system files, so you may want to back them up to a separate drive which is explained, just in case. I take no responsibility if things go pear shaped, and you do this at your own risk.

Now that's out of the way, let's start.

1.) Start by closing any ARC projects that you may have running. Then, from your Charm bar or Windows Start, go to "Search" and type in the following...

C:\Windows\Speech\Engines\TTS\en-GB

Or in windows 10, Simply copy and paste C:\Windows\Speech\Engines\TTS\en-GB in to the "Cortana" taskbar search.