MS Word Read Aloud voice changes tone

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?

I have two choices for the voice, male and female. I tried the male voice, but it also seems to carry an inflection. I tried toggling between the two and it does not change.

I get the same result after exiting Word and restarting, also with other documents, after rebooting, and further with a full system shutdown and restart. It seems stuck in this voice mode now.

I did not alter any settings during this time when it changed. I was simply reading a document, then from one paragraph to another, it altered its tone. I recall stopping the read aloud thing briefly and returning back to the earlier paragraph, where it seemed to use the original voice, but after a while of using the new voice, it continued this way, even if I put it back up to that earlier paragraph where it last used the original voice. Now it uses only that one style of voice.

It wouldn't be so bad, if I could actually assign it to use a voice like this for certain paragraphs, as I'm reading through a book I wrote and might have characters speaking in different tones. But having this "happy" tone all the time is distracting for the context of the text. And right now, I'm trying to proofread the thing, and don't need the voice pronouncing the lines as if it's having a romance with my work. (hehe)

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.

The standard voices that Word uses have no ability to detect or portray the tone or emotion in writing. Very simply: They're not that sophisticated. Whatever you are perceiving isn't coming from Word.

That's simply not true. The natural voices for Read Aloud are trained to speak with inflection and pick up on tone. The changes they have made to the female voice are excessively over the top. If you're in the US and have your preferred language set to English (US), turn on your Read Aloud tool and hear it for yourself.

I'm also a novelist who listens as a form of proofing. Just today, the female voice changed. Such emotion! How do I return to a flatter voice? We are not imagining the change.