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I'm using the Read Aloud feature, and the "female" voice changed its tone when it hit this one paragraph. I don't think there's anything special about the text, but the voice changed to sound emotionally elated. Why is it doing this, when I never hear it use emotion anywhere else?
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
"The changes they have made to the female voice are excessively over the top." Yes, I agree. As a previous commenter wrote: "It’s now some super perky, almost Valley Girl voice I don’t care for at all." Ugh.
I, too, am a writer and used Zira - and for the most part, I liked that particular voice. This new voice is very dramatic and distracting! I plan on sending feedback to Microsoft. Microsoft, please fix this soon!!!
Having a choice (which includes the old Female voice) would be ideal.
If you've been doing this a while (like me) you may remember the voices that came before the "female" and "male" update. The workaround I'm using isn't ideal, but is better than Valley Girl, in my opinion. If you disconnect Word from the internet, it can't find the new voices, so it uses the old ones. Before the previous update, I used Zira, so I'm back to using her. It's a little jarring, but she worked for me for years, so I'm adjusting. Just an idea.
i can give you work around.
Copy your text into notepad save it as .txt file.
open edge and drag that file into edge. at end of address bar is readout loud.
install Microsoft Jenny natural TTS in windows 11 speech settings and you can pick TTS voice in edge to get same result.
Track your text in Word when you listen in edge and correct mistakes.
its off in word you can pick male / femal thats it. when you use that feature in crome you can pick any language pack voice you have installed and force it to that voice.
The Jenny voice (among others) is part of the Narrator feature in the speech settings. I've toyed with it in the past, but I don't like how it announces every little thing on my screen. Also, you need to manually scroll line by line for it to read anything. What I like about Read Aloud is I hit a button and let it go, and it helps me proofread stuff. Although the Jenny (and also the Aria) voice does sound good.
A better solution would be to use only ONE language feature, rather than trying to bug-fix so many odd redundant things like this. Word with Read Aloud, Settings with Narrator, etc. Use just one and make it a system default for everything, so you have less work to monitor. How hard can it be for MS to tie in the Narrator feature to Read Aloud. It's all MS anyway, and probably better than trying to program an independent feature in Word alone. Then you just set one voice for all of it and boom, done. And you have nice voices to use anywhere.
And if something breaks, it's easy to figure out which one it is, as there's only one to look at.