Spanish voice for System.Speech.Synthesis and TTSEngine

Question

I have successfully managed to get System.Speech.Synthesis to read English text in arbitrary voices Anna and Sam. My next task is to localize my application to correctly read Spanish text to our Spanish-speaking clientele.

However, I don't think I am asking the right questions, b/c I cannot find in documentation, forum, group or technology write-up any clear explanation on how this might be done.

1st: Am I correct in saying that there is no setting on the SpeechSynthesizer class or any other Text-To-Speech object? In other words, is it only a matter of installing the correct voice that will read with a Spanish "accent"?

2nd: How does one do this? I have seen links for Spanish libraries that I have tried installing, but I am never able to see these new voices in my Windows XP Speech control panel or in my application's GetInstalledVoices() call.

I am using .Net 3.5 SP 1 one Windows XP SP3, and my code is using Visual Studio 2..8.

If I am missing details, please let me know.

I would appreciate any help. V

Answer 1

having done this before..

First thing you need to do is get a spanish "Voice Font"..

See http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/

The next thing you need to do is translate your text from english to spanish.

Then you pass your spanish translation into the TTS engine, using the spanish voice font.

Speaker.SelectVoice("<voiceName>");