MS Word Read Aloud voice changes tone

I guess the bottom line is that Read Aloud is (whether MS acknowledge it or not) still a beta feature, Not Ready for Prime Time, so some bugs are to be expected. This is unfortunate, but certainly the whole concept of the feature is a very complex one.

The same thing has happened to me! I’m an author who listens to my book using Read Aloud on iOS. I will sometimes write in the Notes app and then copy and paste the text into Word. I did this just now and the voice changed entirely. It’s now some super perky, almost Valley Girl voice I don’t care for at all. When I click on text written before the voice change (i.e. previous chapters), the old, more traditional voice plays. What in the world is going on?

Yeah, this is what I'm getting now. My personal suspicion is a patch or something that may have come in behind our backs. I've had troubles with Read Aloud in the past relating to a patch that either changed it, disabled it, or did something else weird to it. So, I guess we'll just have to wait until they figure it out.

I wouldn't actually know what document to upload to reproduce this, as it's doing it with all my documents now. Even if I go back to the original point where it started, the voice is doing all of it now. Ugh. And I think the male voice also seems to be using inflection. Although it's hard to say as I don't commonly use that one.

I'm a book writer, and I have noticed in the past, in one or two other documents, maybe if I'm using funny writing, like to invent words for a fictitious language, it will switch to something non-standard for that line. I could probably excuse this for the spelling of those words, but here it started out with normal English, moving from a paragraph where someone enters a room and following with some simple dialog.

Could it be a memory glitch? This one document is especially large, and I sometimes experience a bit of lag in the read aloud feature keeping up the highlighted text if it's processing something in the background. Maybe something happened back there that caused it to load an alternate language pattern for some reason? The problem is, I'm unsure if such a thing should even exist under these conditions, if it only has the one to work with.

I also occasionally have issues where it finishes a line, then pauses and repeats some portion of a previous line.

I've reported this issue to the Word product team (though they don't own this feature), and they have suggested we ask for repro documents, though I doubt that the nature of the document text is relevant here. If you (all of you having this issue) can upload a document to OneDrive (or another file sharing service) and make it public, we can share it with the Word team.

Then you and I are having very different experiences. I work in instructional design alongside developers that train natural voices for our videos, so I know the difference. I'm obviously not the only one as there are others here with the same issue.