Why are Natural Voices only available for Narrator and not for Text to Speech?

Question

The natural voices available for Narrator should also be available for standard Text to Speech. For example, I may have Aria reading to me in Narrator, but if I use the TTS feature in Kindle for PC, it can only be David or Zira. No natural voices downloads seem to be available for TTS and I'd rather not use a third party app. What can be done?

Answer 1

Hi Nik,

I'm Amr, an independent advisor.

There is no clear explanation from Microsoft until now why natural voices are only available for the Narrator and not for Text to Speech.

However, there are some third-party solutions that can provide natural voices for Text to Speech in Windows 11.

One such solution is the Acapela TTS Voices app, which offers a range of natural-sounding voices that can be used with various Text to Speech programs.

Another option is to use a screen reader software that supports both Narrator and Text to Speech, such as NVDA or JAWS, which may offer more natural-sounding voices.

You can always provide feedback via the Feedback hup app so Microsoft can hear your requests and act accordingly, that because we are not Microsoft employees we are independent advisors trying to help with common issues

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sen...

I hope this is helpful. If you require any additional assistance, don't hesitate to respond to this.

This is a user-to-user support forum. We're users just like you helping other users to find solutions to their problems.

Best Regard

Amr

Answer 2

ran across this post on stackoverflow recommendes changing a registry setting but do not know how to do this yet. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58189350/installed-text-to-speech-voices-not-showing-up-in-system-speech-options-windows

Text-to-Speech voice IDs are located at two different registry locations.

1)HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech\Voices\Tokens
2)HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech_OneCore\Voices\Tokens\

Location Number '1' only contains some voice IDs while location number '2' contains all voice IDs.

So, try manually copying each registry value from location '2' to location '1'.

Answer 3

Thank you for the very helpful reply, Amr! I did write it as though an employee would read it, didn't I? My apologies. And thank you for the recommendations on third-party solutions.

Answer 4

Thank you for your reply,

This community is dedicated to providing solutions to problems (related to Microsoft products) that users face on a daily basis, we are users just like you.

As for suggestions, it is better to submit them through the Feedback hup app, as I mentioned earlier, for them to be considered and worked on.

Have a great day

Best Regard

Amr