calibre 5.7.2: Voice selection

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

Thanks Jackie. I think I may have been a bit imprecise about the nature of my problem. Those scansoft voices appeared yesterday in my Calibre viewer's "Configure Read Aloud" list of voices. They were not showing up in my Calibre list when I posted these screenshots two days ago, then they appeared, and I stupidly selected one. The error message I posted above is 100% accurate, because a regedit search shows no entries in any key in the entire registry for any ScanSoft voices. My problem is that I can't access the Calibre viewer's "Configure Read Aloud" dialog to repalce the missing voice with one I do have, because attempting to do so by clicking the gears icon brings up that error message.

I don't see any reference to ScanSoft Tom in those screencaps.
You could try:

• Shutdown calibre completely
• Go to your calibre config directory
• Open file viewer-webengine.json in a good text editor (e.g. Notepad++). Go to the bottom and see what value you see for "tts_sapi".
  
  For context, here's a snippet from the end of mine. This setting tells calibre to use the system defaults for Voice:
  

      "user_stylesheet": "body {line-height: 1.3; font-family:serif; widows:1; orphans:1; text-rendering:optimizeLegibility;}"
    },
    "tts_sapi": {},
    "viewer-search-case-sensitive": false,
    "viewer-search-mode": "normal"

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

I don't see any reference to ScanSoft Tom in those screencaps.

That's right, as I said: "They were not showing up in my Calibre list when I posted these screenshots two days ago, then they appeared" (e.a.) That's why it's weird, I have no idea where they came from.

EDIT:

Here's the relevant entry from the json

tts_sapi": {
"rate": 2,
"voice": "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Speech\\ Voices\\Tokens\\ScanSoftTom_Dri20_22kHz"

As expected, the problem is that Calibre viewer's Read Aloud is lookng for a key that isn't there, and never was. Can I just delete that entry from the json to force Calibre to ask me to choose one?

[JSWolf]

I used to have AT&T Natural Voice installed on one of my computers. It did sound a lot more natural then the Windows TTS. And there was a lot more choice of voice.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

That's right, as I said: "They were not showing up in my Calibre list when I posted these screenshots two days ago, then they appeared" (e.a.) That's why it's weird, I have no idea where they came from.

EDIT:

Here's the relevant entry from the json

tts_sapi": {
"rate": 2,
"voice": "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Speech\\ Voices\\Tokens\\ScanSoftTom_Dri20_22kHz"

As expected, the problem is that Calibre viewer's Read Aloud is lookng for a key that isn't there, and never was. Can I just delete that entry from the json to force Calibre to ask me to choose one?

I don't know whether it's safe to delete the whole "tts_sapi" entry but there's no reason why you couldn't change the entry to:

"tts_sapi": {},

i.e. remove the content between the curly brackets {}.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

I don't know whether it's safe to delete the whole "tts_sapi" entry but there's no reason why you couldn't change the entry to:

"tts_sapi": {},

i.e. remove the content between the curly brackets {}.

Excellent, that worked perfectly, thanks! Now I can do the regedit hacks to add the other voices.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I used to have AT&T Natural Voice installed on one of my computers. It did sound a lot more natural then the Windows TTS. And there was a lot more choice of voice.

I've still got 3 AT&T Natural Voices installed on my Win10 PC. They show up and seem to work fine for Viewer Read Aloud in calibre portable 32bit.