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Hello, I was listening to the Read Aloud voice in Word on iOS and from one instant to the next it went from the smooth and melodic female voice to some new perky young Valley Girl voice that is AWFUL. I thought it might have been unique to iOS but I just tried Read Aloud on my Windows laptop and the female voice there has been replaced by some Valley Girl too! I am an author who uses Word for my novels and I rely on the Read Aloud tool every single day. I can't listen to my books in this perky voice. It's almost overdramatic, like a teacher reading a book to a class of kindergartners. (That's not sarcasm, that's honestly what it sounds like.) The previous voice was neutral but still good at picking up emotion and inflection. I highly doubt ANYONE asked for such a huge change. It's simply not functional. Do I have any option at all for getting the old voice back?
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
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Thank you for this post. Absolutely correct! This new voice is very difficult to appreciate, especially when listening to formal or technical documents. It would be very welcome if Microsoft could revert to the former voice or provide an option to select a more neutral voice.
Agreed. I am an attorney who uses this for work to make sure that the recipient of my emails will read it in their head the way that I intended, and the performance is now defeating the purpose of this tool. There is no one on earth that would read my emails like a kindergarten teacher reading a short story to their classroom.
I'm really taken with the new voice—it breathes life into my novel. It seems that preferences vary from person to person. While I do see the value in having the flexibility to select a more neutral voice for those who prefer it, I'm strongly in favor of retaining the new voice as well!
I’m glad you’re able to enjoy it. The problem with the new voice for me is that it assumes far too much about the emotion behind the text. Like most of these trained voices, it seems to display emotion based on word choice, but the same phrase can be meant to be said a thousand different ways depending on context. Their tool isn’t sophisticated enough to pick up on context, though, so it’s getting it all wrong. It’s reading some very emotional scenes in my novel with the same peppy energy a preschool teacher would use to read a book about dinosaurs to four-year-olds. It’s distracting and drowns out my own intentions for the scene. My argument is the voice shouldn’t be “performing” if it’s not sophisticated enough to get it right.
It would probably work for everyone if both versions of the female voice could be available. For now, I’m glad a fellow novelist is benefiting from the change. Happy writing to you, friend.
Yes! I’m an African American fiction writer.
My main character & narrator is African American…. This female valley girl is destroying my ability to use read aloud, and I use it everyday.
I need a way to change the voice back,
I am using Word on my computer and it just changed the voice recently and I can't get back to the other one. I agree with the rest that she sounds like a valley girl. Inflections are totally wrong and I've also noticed that pronunciations are even worse than the other voice. The other voice always had problems with heteronyms but this version of the voice seems to have a lot more words that it doesn't pronounce correctly. I guess I should start looking for a different text to speech program.
Please, Microsoft, fix this.