How to Get Additional Voices for OnScript

OnScript uses Windows SAPI 5 Text-to-Speech engine. You can find out what voices you have available to you by either –

• Clicking Help > Available Voices in OnScript, or

• Press Windows key + R. Then -

  • Type: control

  • Hit: Enter.

  • Select: Ease of Access

  • Select: Speech Recognition

  • Select: Text to Speech

How do I get additional voices?

This is what worked for me using Windows 10. I think this will also work for Windows 11.

First of all you need to install additional language packs for the languages/accents you want. Follow the instructions in this Microsoft article:

Language Packs for Windows

Note

1.      Installing a language pack can take some time to download and install.

2.      The language pack installs a number of voices on your computer but only a limited number (usually only one) SAPI 5 voice is installed.

3.      Not every language pack will install a new SAPI 5 voice for that language. For example I installed Australian English but there was no SAPI 5 voice associated with this pack.

So what voices are available then?

As far as I can work out these are the only packs that will give you additional SAPI 5 voices:

English Language

Language (Region) Name Gender

English (United States) Zira Female

English (United States) David Male

English (Great Britain) Hazel Female

European Languages

Language (Region) Name Gender

French (France) Hortense Female

German (Germany) Hedda Female

Italian (Italy) Elsa Female

Polish (Poland) Paulina Female

Portuguese (Brazil) Maria Female

Russian (Russia) Irina Female

Spanish (Mexico) Sabina Female

Spanish (Spain) Helena Female

Ref: This article

A note on using Non-English Languages in OnScript

I have downloaded and installed the French language pack. This made the Hortense voice available. Hortense quite happily spoke the French language text I put into a OnScript script file. I haven’t tried any of the other non-English voices.