VB 2010 Express: Text-to-speech

Question

Hi, I'm very confused about how to get TTS working in VB 2010 Express. I read several how-tos, each of them showing how to do TTS in a different way (through System.Speech, adding a reference to Microsoft Speech Object Library, using SAPI etc.). Unfortunately none of them works out-of-the box for me, so I need to install additional packages and follow some procedures.

My question is: which is the most straightforward way to enable TTS, choice a non-english voice and be assured to have a portable executable (i.e. installable on XP and Vista machines)?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The biggest roadblock you're going to face is running on XP. Windows Vista & Windows 7 have SAPI 5.3(and system.speech) preinstalled. XP doesn't have SAPI installed at all, so you're going to have to have an installer and add the SAPI merge modules (you want to go to this page and download the Speech 5.1 SDK Redistributables file - SpeechSDK51MSM.exe) to your project's installer (you'll probably need WIX to make this simpler).

The second problem is that there are no free TTS voices that aren't English or Chinese. If you need French or something else, you're going to have to purchase one - and it won't be cheap.

Good luck!