Read Aloud Voices in WORD (they disappeared)

This has also quit working for me as well. Same scenario as listed by Kestrel2022. I had an update that ran on December 8th and when I got on my computer on December 9th I noticed the feature not working. I have repaired my version of office and still doesn't work. It appears that Word doesn't know how to select a voice it only shows male or female and doesn't list the voice name. Again this was pointed out by Kestrel2022.

This is exactly what happened to me a couple of months ago. As can be seen by Microsoft's reply above, they are working on it and will send out an update when they are ready. My guess is they erroneously put out the updated voices and then pulled them back when they realized it. And of course, nobody will even acknowledge that the good voices were out in the wild for some period of time. I even had one tech on the Microsoft website tell me I was mistaken when I thought I heard better voices and even denied that I saw different voice options in the dropdown list.

Why lie about it? Someday we will get better voices--but maybe Microsoft won't be the ones who provide them.

Microsoft support responded with:

Dear Fred,
We are still working on it and we will share the updates soon. You can update your Office application after the update.
Thanks,
Sonam, Read Aloud Crew

No explanation or acknowledgement that what I experience was real. Just a note that there will be an update someday. I hope (when it does arrive) that it's the same quality as what I was using and lost.

Yes! The new "male" and "female" voices were far better, just introduced late 2021 as AI-powered, as far as I know. They had way more natural speech and better pronunciation than the built-in Windows "named" voices. This week, they disappeared on me and now just David, Zira, and Mark show up, which sound like Sound Blaster voices from the 1990s.

I hope they just allow a choice. Some people here like the robotic voices. But for everyone else allow us to choose the modern "smart" voices that work far better.

My laptop is fairly new Dell (much less than a year). I bought it with Windows 10 and Office 2019 pre-installed. I have never loaded third party voices or any software that should have affected the sound system in any way (that I am aware of). When I got the new machine, I tried Read Aloud (with the three standard voices). It was too irritating to use. When I upgraded (a week ago) to Windows 11, I got the wild notion to try Read aloud again. To my surprise, there were other choices for voices. I found both a male and female voice that were quite good (not perfect, but they sounded much closer to real speech than anything I've heard). For several days, I enjoyed using Read Aloud to help with proofreading my current manuscript. After chapter 39 (of 71) I rebooted the laptop (something I do regularly to ensure updates are installed). When I started my next round of proofreading, it hurt my ears. I assumed the reboot reset my Read Aloud voice so I went to changed it to the one I was using and could not find it. Only the three standard ones were available.

I played with every setup feature I could think of. I search the web for a solution. I contacted Microsoft support and spent quite a bit of time as the tech reinstalled my office suite (twice). The end result was there are only three voices--the ones you mentioned above and I still have them.)

So... where did my good voices come from and why are they not there now? And why doesn't anybody else know about them?

One caveat on the attached screen shot. The Microsoft tech remotely reinstalled my office twice---I don't know if this destroyed anything you may have been looking for.

I appreciate any help I can get. Thanks.......