If the references are absent, remove these (highlighted) references: (Figure 1)įigure 1: Speech Related Project ReferencesĪfter removing the old references, right click on the project and select “Add Reference”.
Once you have installed the Speech SDK, go back to the project and run a build. If you need to update the project references, do so prior to attempting to run the application. For example, my Toshiba laptop has an additional voice called “TOSHIBA male adult (U.S.)” and this voice also appears as available to this application at runtime. If you have any other voices on your system, they may also be exposed to the application.
You do not need to activate the reader for this to work, however, you can’t install the additional voices unless you have the reader installed. You may also obtain a couple of additional voices (the SDK includes Microsoft Mary, Microsoft Mike, and Microsoft Sam) by downloading the Microsoft Reader and additional TTS components found here (not required, but you will gain two additional voices if you do add these to your system). These may be downloaded with the SDK at no cost, from this URL: To begin, you may not have the necessary references on your machine as the application requires the installation of Microsoft’s Speech 5.1 SDK and the Microsoft sample TTS engine library. This form contains all of the code necessary to get a start with programming TTS. You will note that the project contains a file cleverly named “ Form1.vb”. In order to get started, unzip the included project and open the solution in the Visual Studio 2005 environment. The application provides examples of generating speech as you type, passing canned phrases to TTS, and passing entire text files to TTS.
The application is intended to provide an introduction to working with the TTS library, by illustrating how to go about gaining access to and manipulating voices, and playing text out as synthesized voice. The application performs several functions although all work in basically the same manner.
This article does not address the newer speech server related libraries, nor does it address web based deployments of speech related technologies. NET developers through the Microsoft Speech 5.1 SDK. This article describes an application used to exercise some of the Text To Speech features available to.