the read aloud voice changed overnight. how do I get the old voice back?

You are absolutely right. Copilot must have been hallucinating about WPS doing Natural Voices. I installed it in a Sandbox and nowhere in the menu selection was the choice for Read Aloud. I would NEVER drop Word; it is way more powerful than any other word processor. I was just looking to find a solution to read a 165,000-word document for proof reading. But I should have tested it before repeating CoPilot or should have asked ChatGPT.

I just posted on MS Word Feedback and found I had posted last week about the issue (admittedly, I had just returned from the hospital emergency department, and they had given me a big dose of morphine for pain, so my memory was buffering badly). That said, there is still no response to point to a solution. I'll post it here if they give me one.

Being a writer, I sometimes find a little creative framing helps make surviving bad things easier, so I shared that "support desk prayer" to lighten things up.

Copilot recommended the following: I have not tried it yet, but I may try it in the isolated Microsoft Sandbox on Windows 11 Pro.

WPS Office Writer could be a good recommendation for users who are unhappy with the recent changes in Microsoft Word. ***

Robert,

I have not received a similar recommendation from Copilot and am unfamiliar with WPS Office Writer.

I have known Copilot to hallucinate about things, including solutions in Word.

You posted the same thing a few days ago in response to other posts about this issue. I trust that you are sincere in trying to help.

Have you now tried WPS Office Writer in the day since you first posted this?

I suppose the same could be said of Google Docs, Pages, and Libre Office. They are all "compatible" with Word in that they read and write .docx files. None of them has all the features of Word. Perhaps people do not need or even want those features. I do not know if any of them have the Read Aloud feature. I do not know that WPS Office Writer does, either. I am sure that there is a learning curve to using them.

Just to let you know I enjoyed reading your feedback and the feedback of many others. It’s comforting to know that I am now alone!! Aloha

I haven’t even gone past your first two lines of feedback and I am so laughing aloud but we want Read Aloud!!! I know! Thank you for making sense of this issue, enough so that I don’t go insane!

Aloha