How to unlock new text to speech voices in Windows 10?

October 9, 2018 |

greater than 5 minutes

Text-to-speech voices have been added to the Windows operating system starting from Windows Vista. In Windows Vista and 7, Anna was introduced. David, Zira, and Hazel were introduced in Windows 8 and 8.1. Other voices were also added in Windows 10, which you will see later in this article. There are many advantages and uses of the text-to-speech option:

The text-to-speech option is very useful for users who find it difficult to read from the computer screen. It can read text aloud for the user.
This option is also useful for multitasking. Your computer can read texts to you while you are doing other things.
It can also help you learn the pronunciations of words you are not familiar with.

Windows 10 users have found out new voices in the US English version of the operating system: Microsoft Eva Mobile, Microsoft Mark, and Cortana’s voice. Other languages and regions have their voices. Unfortunately, Eva’s voice is not available for use, but we will show you how to unlock it.

Here is a list of all the voices for all the versions of Windows 10 operating system:

LANGUAGE, COUNTRY, OR REGION	MALE VOICE NAME	FEMALE VOICE NAME
Arabic	Not applicable	Hoda
Arabic (Saudi Arabia)	Naayf	Not applicable
Bulgarian	Ivan	Not applicable
Catalan	Not applicable	Herena
Chinese (Simplified)	Kangkang	Huihui, Yaoyao
Cantonese (Traditional, Hong Kong SAR)	Danny	Tracy
Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan)	Zhiwei	Yating, Hanhan
Croatian	Matej	Not applicable
Czech (Czech Republic)	Jakub	Not applicable
Danish	Not applicable	Helle
Dutch	Frank	Not applicable
English (Australia)	James	Catherine
English (Canada)	Richard	Linda
English (Great Britain)	George	Hazel, Susan
English (India)	Ravi	Heera
English (Ireland)	Sean	Not applicable
English (United States)	David, Mark	Zira
Finnish	Not applicable	Heidi
Flemish (Belgian Dutch)	Bart	Not applicable
French (Canada)	Claude	Caroline
French (France)	Paul	Hortence, Julie
German (Germany)	Stefan	Hedda, Katja
German (Switzerland)	Karsten	Not applicable
Greek	Stefanos	Not applicable
Hebrew	Asaf	Not applicable
Hindi (India)	Hemant	Kalpana
Hungarian (Hungary)	Szabolcs	Not applicable
Indonesian (Indonesia)	Andika	Not applicable
Italian	Cosimo	Elsa
Japanese	Ichiro	Ayumi, Haruka
Malay	Rizwan	Not applicable
Norwegian	Jon	Not applicable
Polish (Poland)	Adam	Paulina
Portuguese (Brazil)	Daniel	Maria
Portuguese (Portugal)	Not applicable	Helia
Romanian (Romania)	Andrei	Not applicable
Russian (Russia)	Pavel	Irina
Slovak (Slovakia)	Filip	Not applicable
Slovenian	Lado	Not applicable
Korean	Not applicable	Heami
Spanish (Spain)	Pablo	Helena, Laura
Spanish (Mexico)	Raul	Sabina
Swedish	Bengt	Not applicable
Tamil	Valluvar	Not applicable
Thai (Thailand)	Pattara	Not applicable
Turkish	Tolga	Not applicable
Vietnamese	An	Not applicable

Now, we will show you how to configure text-to-speech options in Windows 10. Here is how to do it:

Press the Windows logo key + I on your keyboard to open the Settings app.
Select Time and Language. In the next window, select Speech on the left panel.
On the right panel, you will see options such as Speech language, where you can change the language of the narrator. There are also options to change the voice of the narrator, to make Windows recognize non-native accents of the language, and a speed bar to adjust how fast the narrator talks.

If you want additional voices for the text-to-speech tool, you are in the right place. In this article, we are going to show you how to unlock new text-to-speech voices in Windows 10. You can do this using registry tweaks:

Press the Windows logo key + R on your keyboard to open the Run dialog box.
Input regedit in the search area and press Enter. This will open the Windows Editor.
In the Windows Editor, navigate to the following location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Speech_OneCore > Voices > Tokens. Here, you will find the list of voices installed on your PC.
Right-click on the one you want to enable and select Export from the drop-down menu.
Navigate to where you saved the .reg and open it with Notepad. Now, you need to edit the text. Let us say you decided to enable Mark’s voice for the US English operating system. Here is how the original file looks:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech_OneCore\Voices\Tokens\MSTTS_V110_enUS_MarkM]

@=”Microsoft Mark – English (United States)”

“409”=”Microsoft Mark – English (United States)”

“CLSID”=”{179F3D56-1B0B-42B2-A962-59B7EF59FE1B}”

“LangDataPath”=hex(2):25,00,77,00,69,00,6e,00,64,00,69,00,72,00,25,00,5c,00,53,\

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00,70,00,65,00,65,00,63,00,68,00,5f,00,4f,00,6e,00,65,00,43,00,6f,00,72,00,\

65,00,5c,00,45,00,6e,00,67,00,69,00,6e,00,65,00,73,00,5c,00,54,00,54,00,53,\

00,5c,00,65,00,6e,00,2d,00,55,00,53,00,5c,00,4d,00,53,00,54,00,54,00,53,00,\

4c,00,6f,00,63,00,65,00,6e,00,55,00,53,00,2e,00,64,00,61,00,74,00,00,00

“VoicePath”=hex(2):25,00,77,00,69,00,6e,00,64,00,69,00,72,00,25,00,5c,00,53,00,\

70,00,65,00,65,00,63,00,68,00,5f,00,4f,00,6e,00,65,00,43,00,6f,00,72,00,65,\

00,5c,00,45,00,6e,00,67,00,69,00,6e,00,65,00,73,00,5c,00,54,00,54,00,53,00,\

5c,00,65,00,6e,00,2d,00,55,00,53,00,5c,00,4d,00,31,00,30,00,33,00,33,00,4d,\

00,61,00,72,00,6b,00,00,00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech_OneCore\Voices\Tokens\MSTTS_V110_enUS_MarkM\Attributes]

“Age”=”Adult”

“DataVersion”=”11.0.2013.1022”

“Gender”=”Male”

“Language”=”409”

“Name”=”Microsoft Mark”

“SharedPronunciation”=””

“Vendor”=”Microsoft”

“Version”=”11.0”

Now, the edited file will look like this:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech\Voices\Tokens\MSTTS_V110_enUS_MarkM]