MS Word Read Aloud voice changes tone

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.

Change your Proofing language from English (US) to English (Canada) restart word and try again it should sound different. Sadly you cant use Aria or Jenny natural voices that way in word.

This is a reasonable suggestion--and one that should be made directly to Microsoft. You can submit suggestions to Microsoft via Help | Feedback in any Microsoft 365 application or through the Feedback Hub or Feedback Portal.

Change your Proofing language from English (US) to English (Canada) restart word and try again it should sound different. Sadly you cant use Aria or Jenny natural voices that way in word.

I was able to do this with my Windows 11 laptop a couple days ago, but the iOS mobile app only has the US english voices in the voice pack. But thank you for the reply!

I am also an author who uses Word's Read Aloud option on a daily basis. The NEW female voice is awful and distracting! She sounds like someone reading a bad, breathy romance novel. It is wholly inappropriate in my mystery novel. Can I please have the old female voice back, or at least give us an option between the two?

When this first happened to me, it was, as others have said, suddenly in a new paragraph or when it would hit dialogue quotation marks. Now, it is all the time. I hate it.