Natural text-to-speech voice

[DieAntonie]

Reading text on a screen, especially my academic text books is a grind, lately I've come across Edge's amazing 'read aloud' functionality that's seriously improved my experience, and ability to absorb information, even reading long articles.

However, I find that the text-to-speech voices that edge leverages, have the same clunky robotic accents that thy did back in Windows XP, which - after a while - can become quite tedious and become an effort to understand and absorb.

I have come across an abundance of open source projects that provide a much more natural sounding text reading voice, and I'm wondering if there has ever been an interest in giving the text-to-speech functionality an overhaul. We are in the year 2019 after all, and still relying on accessibility features from pre-2010 is becoming obstructive .

Is this a change that we will see in future updates, or will it be left in the hands of third parties?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi,
you can try the new Edge insider browser that is going to replace the Edge classic soon and it supports natural text to speech using online servers.
https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/

discussion commnity for Edge insider:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Edge-Insider/ct-p/MicrosoftEdgeInsider

[#3]

@HotCakeX Yes! I can't wait for it to roll out to the stable version! I immediately jumped on the chromium build! Although, I think I could have waited a bit longer as the PDF reader features haven't quite caught up with legacy edge, but the new natural text-to-speech is my prayers answered!

Thank you so much for the wonderful work!