Text-to-speech

[Rob Cambra]

I type a lot of long documents in MS Word on an XP
machine. Often, I don't have time to have others proof
read my stuff and prefer my readers think my education
wasn't a waste. Many years ago (Windows 3.1 days) I used
to have a little app that would read my text back to me.
It sounded very "computerish" but got the job done. I
could at least catch grammatical and gross spelling
errors.

I've fiddle around with text to speech in Windows XP but
can't make it do very much. Am I on the right track in
assuming this will read back written text? If so, can
anyone point me to instructions (for the lay person) on
how to configure it.

My hardware/software is as follows:
-Intel D845WN MB w/P4 2.0Ghz
-512MB RAM
-MB-integrated sound
-Windows XP Pro SP1 and all the latest updates
-MS Office XP Pro w/SP2

Thanks for your help
Rob

 

[RJK]

Text-to-speech overview
Text-to-speech (TTS) is the ability of the operating system to play back
printed text as spoken words. An internal driver, called a TTS engine,
recognizes the text and using a synthesized voice chosen from several
pre-generated voices, speaks the written text. A TTS engine is installed
with the operating system. Additional engines are also available through
third party manufacturers. These engines often use a certain jargon or
vocabulary; for example, a vocabulary specializing in medical or legal
terminology. They can also use different voices allowing for regional
accents such as British English, or speak a different language altogether
such as German, French or Russian. For more information on third parties who
provide additional SAPI 5-compatible components, please visit our Third
Party Products page.

The Text-to-Speech tab on Speech properties in Control Panel presents the
options for each TTS engine. See the individual Help topics for specific
help. In addition to the general options, each engine can have a different
set of specific features. For that reason, not all the resulting dialog
boxes will look the same. It is possible that no special features have been
included and some of the properties buttons will not have an associated
dialog box.

regards, Richard

 

[RJK]

ooops !..
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=306902

regards, Richard