I tried West Europe and it worked! I tested this both in the audio content studio and by using the API. Both results were the same. In both US West and US East regions I get the wrong voice, but in the West Europe region I get the correct voice. I'm certainly not opposed to this getting resolved in my local regions, but more than anything I'm just happy to have access to the voice again. I needed to write the API code anyway so this gave me an excuse to get around to it, so everything worked out well. :) Thanks so much for your help! If you need anything from me to help resolve this issue any further, please let me know.
Why did the voice I was using in Azure Speech Studio suddenly disappear (and was seemingly replaced with a lower quality voice)?
I was using Azure Speech Studio to create some spoken word content back on (approximately) February 7th (2022) using the Chinese (Mandarin, Simplified) voice Xiaoxiao (primarily in the lyrical style). I came back a few days ago because I needed to make a small change to the dialogue and now her voice is completely different. I tried all of the other voices just in case it got switched due to some kind of glitch but none of them are the voice I was working with before. I thought that maybe it was somehow an issue with updated settings and pronunciations—since I'm using a voice intended to speak Chinese to instead speak English with a slight accent—but upon a direct comparison the difference is extremely obvious. Aside from a different accent, the speech style is very different and the audio is less clear. I wasn't allowed to upload an MP3 to this post so here is a link to the comparison:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5gh16xgr4i309jp/azure-speech-missing-voice-issue.mp3?dl=0
I used a standard English voice to explain which clip is which, but just to be clear that voice isn't part of this issue and the first voice saying "What do you think makes a person who they are?" is the missing voice. The second voice that says that is the one that seems to have replaced this original voice. There are no other comparable voice options on Azure that I'm able to find (that speak clearly with this light accent) or on any other TTS platform I've tried—and I've tried a lot. I really, really want to get this voice back but I can't even get an answer regarding why this happened in the first place. There's no information anywhere and all support options have directed me here. Please help!