Greetings to all,
I am seeking some guidance on the use of 3rd Party Voice for Logos. I am running Windows 8.1 and had no problem with the "read aloud" until January 2014. To this date I am not able to use that function, but the ESV Audio and the Hymnals work fine. Tech support has been working on my problem for the past 4 months and have not found a solution. I'm wondering if I purchased a 3rd party voice, would it work. I ask this question to tech support and have not received an answer yet. Has any who had this problem, found 3rd Party Voice to be an option?
Thanks for any help provided.
I didn't find your specific tech support case notes, but I've looked into a very similar issue for another customer.
As far as I can tell, this is a bug in the .NET Framework (that wraps the underlying Windows Speech API). For one customer, I wrote a five-line program that reproduced the failure to speak, followed by a hang (so it seems very unlikely to be a bug in Logos itself).
We're not aware of any workarounds for this problem. To me, it seems unlikely that changing the voice (or installing a new voice) would help the issue; the problem appears to be in .NET, not in a specific voice. (Additionally, no customers have reported to us that changing the voice fixes the bug.)
Microsoft is currently not fixing bugs in System.Speech (the component with the problem) but is instead promoting their new Microsoft Speech Platform (a different text-to-speech component). Unfortunately, Microsoft Speech Platform doesn't support installable third-party voices, so if we switched, we would be removing functionality from customers who have paid for third-party voices to use with Logos 5 Read Aloud. It's possible that we could add an option allowing you to pick the text-to-speech engine to use (System.Speech to allow third-party voices, or Microsoft.Speech to avoid hangs). However, I don't have any information on when an update to Logos 5 that includes support for Microsoft.Speech might be available.
Thanks Bradley for your reply,
The case number which was assigned to me is 83493 and I was working with Anton and Elizabeth Gifford. Not being that tech savvy, I'm confused as to why it worked from July to December 2013 and then stopped. I have had to computer company check my system and all appears to work fine. As there is no workaround, I guess I'm stuck. Thanks again for your feedback.