A Quick Question On Voices From A Newbie

[GAJ52 54]

I'm currently using the Trial version of P2A and prior to this I have never used any of the Microsoft text to speech voices so my knowledge is zero on this subject.

I'm using Windows 10 Pro (fully updated), when I go into the P2A's Config - Voices menu, it seems to recognise 3 Microsoft voices David, Hazel and Zira plus other voices like Charles 16, Crystal 16 etc.  The 3 Microsoft voices work fine, but if I select Crystal 16 for example and press TEST I get a Unhandled Exception fault message and P2A crashes.

So far I'm really impressed with P2A so will probably buy it, I've noticed comments about downloading extra voices, is this still possible with Windows 10 Pro, and can anyone give a newbie any advise on where to find these extra voices.

Thanks

[Dave-Pilot2ATC 870]

I suspect that Charles 16 and Crystal 16 are older voices that are installed on your system or are from some other program and are not SAPI-5 compliant.  Don't use them. 

If you want a few "free" voices from Microsoft, you have to install other language packs along with their desktop voices from the countries/cultures that have additional voices like India, Spain, Great Britain, etc.  You can search the Microsoft site to see which pack have extra voices.  This is a long and tedious process, but gives you voices with some very different accents.  Be sure you are looking at Desktop voices.  The Mobile voices are not usable with Desktop applications like P2A.

IVONA and CereProc are two vendors that have a pretty good selection of SAPI 5 voices.  Right now, the CereProc voices have some issues and can cause crashes, but CereProc is supposed to be fixing these issues at some point.

Dave

[GAJ52 54]

Thanks for the info.