Add "Natural Voices" to Voiceover options

[TotalChris]

I'm not sure if this is exclusive to Win11, or if there are natural voices on Win10 too, but when I enable a natural voice profile in Windows narrator settings, it doesn't show up in MagicPods as an available voice for voiceover notifications. This would be cool to see!

[steam3d]

Hi. Can you show how to enable it? I can find this on my windows machine.

[DarthAV]

This setting is in the narrator settings seen in the screenshot below.

However, it does not look like the natural voices show up in the speech section of settings, even if you add them in narrator.

There might be a different way to access these voices programmatically than the legacy voices.

[steam3d]

Unfortunately I do not have such option. Maybe it is specific option of you laptop?

[DarthAV]

Are you able to add the natural voices in this menu:

[steam3d]

I found voice. I will add a task to figure out if it possible to use in external application. This will take a long time because I am making major changes to the logic to optimize the application right now.

[andrewcincotta]

Any updates on this?

[steam3d]

I do not have any good news. I did no find how to add it. If you know third party software that already use it let me know.

[steam3d]

Of course I'm still looking for a solution.

[gexgd0419]

I found a way to use those natural voices. It may not be a "legit" way, though.

The Narrator natural voices are offline (embedded) versions of Azure AI Speech voices. Microsoft limits third-party access to embedded speech models, and requires submitting an application form if you want to use them. Obviously, Microsoft encourages most users to use the online versions of Azure AI Speech voices, which have more features, but require an Internet connection, and cost money.

The Narrator natural voices are encrypted with a key which isn't public. But after some investigation, I extracted the key from a system file SpeechSynthesizerExtension.dll. With the correct key, the Narrator natural voices can be used as embedded speech models in the documented way.

Based on that, I wrote a program NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter that can make Narrator natural voices accessible to all SAPI 5 compatible programs. So if MagicPods supports SAPI 5 voices, you can install NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter, then use the natural voices in MagicPods.

But as this is not supported by Microsoft, it can stop working after some system update.

If you are using Windows 10 (17763 or above), you can still install those natural voices using these Microsoft Store links.

[steam3d]

@gexgd0419 I use speechsynthesizer. I will check if it supports SAPI 5 voices

[gexgd0419]

It does. IIRC, the whole System.Speech is a wrapper around SAPI 5.