What you need to know
Apr 20, 2018 The default voice of Microsoft David is selected, and clicking the Preview Voice button in Speech Settings does produce David's voice confirming that Speech works. With an up-to-date Win10 OS, an up-to-date 'fresh' install of Office 2016, and Speech that works, what else could cause the Read Aloud not to work? Jan 08, 2017 This is how to get Word to read text aloud. Follow these simple steps to get Word 2010 reading back your selected text. Text to speech facility in 2016 enabled in no time.
May 02, 2017 Using Dictation in Microsoft Word for Mac - Duration: 2:16. Pa Pages 28,738 views. ReadAloud is a very powerful text-to-speech app which can read aloud web pages, news, documents, e-books or your own custom contents. ReadAloud can help with your busy life by reading aloud your articles while you continue with your other tasks. This app can be of great help to students with their reading assignments. Mar 20, 2019 Add the Speak button to the Quick Access Toolbar. Click the Speak button to listen to your text. Select the Read Aloud command. Change the Speak preferences in the Windows Control Panel.
- New voices powered by deep neural networks are now available in Microsoft Edge.
- The voices are meant to sound much more natural and less robotic.
- You can try the new voices now in the Edge Dev and Canary channels.
Microsoft today launched a new set of voices in the Microsoft Edge Dev and Canary channels that should make the 'read aloud' feature sound much more natural. Responding to feedback that the current voices sound too robotic and it was onerous to install language packs to read other languages, the new voices are powered by deep neural networks in the cloud.
The voices are broken down into two categories that you can choose from, according to Microsoft:
- Neural voices – Powered by deep neural networks, these voices are the most natural sounding voices available today.
- Standard voices – These voices are the standard online voices offered by Microsoft Cognitive Services. Voices with '24kbps' in their title will sound clearer compared to other standard voices due to their improved audio bitrate.
You can distinguish these voices from the others by their names. The new voices are labeled as 'Microsoft
You can try the new voices out for ourself by selecting text from a webpage, right clicking, and selecting the 'read aloud' option from the context menu. From there, you'll have access to a read aloud menu bar where you can choose different voices and the speed at which they speak.
These voices are still in testing as part of the new Chromium-powered Edge, so there will likely be some hiccups. However, hearing more natural, hman-sounding voices should make the read aloud feature much more pleasant to use. Further, Microsoft has opened these voices up to developers as an API so they can use them in their own web-based text-to-speech apps.
Microsoft Word Read Aloud Voices Mac Download
If you have yet to give the new Chromium-based Edge a shot, you can download the Dev and Canary channels from the Edge Insider website to get started.
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Microsoft today announced the launch of new neural text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities in Azure Cognitive Services, its suite of AI-imbued APIs and SDKs that enable developers to tailor the voice of their apps and services to fit their brand. Each of three new styles — newscast, customer service, and digital assistant — promises natural-sounding speech that matches the patterns and intonations of human voices.
“Built on a powerful base model, our neural TTS voices are very natural, reliable, and expressive. Through transfer learning, the neural TTS model can learn different speaking styles from various speakers, enabling nuanced voices,” wrote Microsoft in a blog post.
The newscast voice reflects a “professional tone” you might hear on a TV or radio newscast, which is to say it contains no trace of regionalism and uses standard broadcasting pronunciation, a form of pronunciation in which no letters are dropped. In addition to Azure Cognitive Services, Microsoft says the newscast-style voice is in the Microsoft Listening Docs for WeChat, which can read aloud Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents and generate audio for online trainings, news podcasts, and more. It’s also in the Bing mobile app — when you search with the voice search feature, you’ll hear the news briefs using the newscast voice:
The customer service-style voice features a “friendly” and “engaging” tone that Microsoft says is tuned for scenarios involving customer support, like reporting a claim. By contrast, the digital assistant voice — which is available in two styles, a chat style for casual, conversational bots and a professional style for applications like in-car digital assistants — features a helpful tone that’s suited to relaying weather forecasts, navigation directions, reminders, and other information.
Beyond the voice styles optimized for specific scenarios, Microsoft this morning released several new emotion styles, which can be adjusted to express different emotions to fit a given context. There’s cheerfulness or empathy, and in Chinese a lyrical style, which Microsoft describes as “heartfelt” and optimized to read prose or poetry.
Microsoft Word Read Aloud Text
The new voice styles are available in English and Chinese, while the emotion styles are available for English, Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese. Microsoft notes that the styles can be customized through the Custom Neural Voice feature within Microsoft Speech Studio, allowing brands to build unique voices that benefit from the new scenarios.
Word Read Aloud Voices
Microsoft is effectively going toe to toe with Google, which last year debuted 31 new AI-synthesized WaveNet voices and 24 new standard voices in its Cloud Text-to-Speech service (bringing the total number of WaveNet voices to 57). It has another rival in Amazon, which recently launched a service — Brand Voice — that taps AI to generate custom spokespeople and offers a number of voice styles and emotion styles through Amazon Polly, Amazon’s cloud offering that converts text into speech.