MS Word Read Aloud voice changes tone

Actually Word updated in March and the reading voice now includes inflection.

I suppose I would not mind the inflection if it were to at least reflect upon the context of what is being said. Like some others in here, I write books, and having that "valley girl" inflection is entirely inappropriate to the context.

On the other hand, if MS is putting so much attention into this new Copilot AI thing, that might be cool if it could analyze the context for any statements like "so-n-so said 'this' angrily, while whosits said 'that', happily." Otherwise, it should go back to no inflection, as this would be the best for the neutrality of the idea.

Furthermore, I would still say, if you're going to involve anything at all, it should be a choice so you can customize it your way.

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 having the same issue, but when I turned off this option, the female voice no longer switched during paragraphs. Maybe it will work you all too.

Thank you for this. Unfortunately my issue is now that the voice is stuck in Valley Girl. It’s not going back and forth any longer and I have no option to select a different female voice. But I appreciate you trying to help!

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.

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.