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EJBSFO's avatar
EJBSFO
Copper Contributor
Mar 04, 2022

Where are Read Aloud voices for Micorsoft Word?

I'm trying to use Read Aloud in Word and can only get access to "male" and "female" voices. I know there are others, Msft David, Msft Zira, and a whole bunch of others. I've used them in other progra...
Doug_Robbins_Word_MVP's avatar
Doug_Robbins_Word_MVP
MVP
Mar 05, 2022

EJBSFO It appears to be a bit random.

 

First I had two voices

Then I played around with the voices under Windows>Settings>Time & Language>Speech, previewing some of them,

 

 

then when I went back to Word, I had three voices, none of them being any of the original two (and not including the one that I had left as the default under Windows Settings

 

 

EJBSFO's avatar
EJBSFO
Copper Contributor
Mar 05, 2022

Doug_Robbins_Word_MVP 

Thanks for the reply, Doug.

I'd already tried what you recommended but got nowhere with my Asus laptop running Win10 Pro. OTOH, my Dell Desktop running Win10 Home gives me access to several voices, including David and Zira, no problem. 

 

The settings are the same on the two, only the Pro vs Home is different. Is that part of it? It's the laptop I need the voices on, so this is frustrating. 

 

Here's something amusing: until recently, I was using LibreOffice rather than Word, and in LO I can get David and Zira to talk just fine. But I can't in Word? It was nonsense like this that moved me from Word to LO in the first place (after years of teaching Word to others!)

 

Would it be worthwhile to delete the voice packs and reinstall? Reinstall Windows? 

 

Thanks,

Ed

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