InstalledVoice Class

Contains information about an installed speech synthesis voice.

Inheritance Hierarchy

System.Object
  Microsoft.Speech.Synthesis.InstalledVoice

Namespace:  Microsoft.Speech.Synthesis
Assembly:  Microsoft.Speech (in Microsoft.Speech.dll)

Syntax

'Declaration
Public Class InstalledVoice
'Usage
Dim instance As InstalledVoice

public class InstalledVoice

Remarks

Use this class to get information about an installed voice, including its culture (language-country/region), name, gender, age, and whether it is enabled.

A voice is an installed Runtime Language for speech synthesis (TTS, or text-to-speech). The Microsoft Speech Platform Runtime 11 and Microsoft Speech Platform SDK 11 do not include any Runtime Languages for speech synthesis. You must download and install a Runtime Language for each language in which you want to generate synthesized speech. A Runtime Language includes the language model, acoustic model, and other data necessary to provision a speech engine to perform speech synthesis in a particular language. See InstalledVoice for more information.

The Runtime Languages are different for each version of the Speech Platform Runtime. You must download the Runtime Language version that matches the version of the Speech Platform Runtime that you have installed. The Runtime Languages for the Speech Platform SDK 11 are redistributable and are different than the languages that ship with Windows Vista or Windows 7. Use the following link to download Runtime Languages for version 11 of the Speech Platform Runtime:

• Microsoft Speech Platform Runtime Languages v11.0

See Language Support for a list of languages for which you can download Runtime Languages.

Examples

The following example is part of a console application that initializes a SpeechSynthesizer object and outputs to the console a list of the installed voices (runtime languages for speech synthesis) and demonstrates the information that is available for each voice.

using System;
using Microsoft.Speech.Synthesis;
using Microsoft.Speech.AudioFormat;

namespace SampleSynthesis
{
  class Program
  {
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {

      // Initialize a new instance of the SpeechSynthesizer.
      using (SpeechSynthesizer synth = new SpeechSynthesizer())
      {

        // Output information about all of the installed voices. 
        Console.WriteLine("Installed voices -");
        foreach (InstalledVoice voice in synth.GetInstalledVoices())
        {
          VoiceInfo info = voice.VoiceInfo;
          string AudioFormats = "";
          foreach (SpeechAudioFormatInfo fmt in info.SupportedAudioFormats)
          {
            AudioFormats += String.Format("{0}\n",
            fmt.EncodingFormat.ToString());
          }

          Console.WriteLine(" Name:          " + info.Name);
          Console.WriteLine(" Culture:       " + info.Culture);
          Console.WriteLine(" Age:           " + info.Age);
          Console.WriteLine(" Gender:        " + info.Gender);
          Console.WriteLine(" Description:   " + info.Description);
          Console.WriteLine(" ID:            " + info.Id);
          Console.WriteLine(" Enabled:       " + voice.Enabled);
          if (info.SupportedAudioFormats.Count != 0)
          {
            Console.WriteLine(" Audio formats: " + AudioFormats);
          }
          else
          {
            Console.WriteLine(" No supported audio formats found");
          }

          string AdditionalInfo = "";
          foreach (string key in info.AdditionalInfo.Keys)
          {
            AdditionalInfo += String.Format("  {0}: {1}\n", key, info.AdditionalInfo[key]);
          }

          Console.WriteLine(" Additional Info - " + AdditionalInfo);
          Console.WriteLine();
        }
      }
      Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit...");
      Console.ReadKey();
    }
  }
}

Thread Safety

Any public static (Shared in Visual Basic) members of this type are thread safe. Any instance members are not guaranteed to be thread safe.

See Also

Reference

InstalledVoice Members

Microsoft.Speech.Synthesis Namespace