USERVOICE review: Read aloud to provide ability to switch voice in Logos 4; imagine reading English

MJ. Smith

Read aloud to provide ability to switch voice in Logos 4; imagine reading English & Chinese Bible!?!

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Considering that Logos 4 is multilingual, with multilingual resources. I would love to have at least one default voice for each language that Logos supports. Within each language, I really like to have the ability to select from a list of voices I have in the system.

This is a request where I must let pragmatics override ideals. I would love to see this but I suspect that there must be a certain volume of users within a given language to make it profitable. Or perhaps something like going through a funding process. But for those needing another language - go for it.

Robert M. Warren

Even though I think one impetus for the User Voice poster's request was probably the fact that when you change voices in Windows, you must restart Logos for that to take effect*, I'll add a WIndows 10 tip here that will make the OS steps for changing the voices a little simpler.

If you simply type "change text to speech settings" after clicking the Start Button (or whatever it's called now), and click the sprocket icon that appears with what you typed, you'll see the Settings section for Speech language. This is part of what MS is apparently wanting to supplant Control Panel. Midway down the window, see the section for changing voices. The problem is (when I do this) only two MS-supplied voices appear: Mobile Mark & Mobile Zira. I don't see my two third-party voices, which are markedly superior. Perhaps there is another way in the new paradigm to change to third-party voices, but it isn't obvious.

Control Panel still exists in WIndows 10; it can be invoked by right-clicking the Start Button. In the Search box in Control Panel, type "voice" (no quotes). Look for "Speech Recognition"; below it is "Change text to speech settings." This is what you really want. Here, you'll see MS's David Desktop & Zira Desktop, and any third-party voices you've installed.

To set this up to take fewer steps, create a shortcut to:   C:\Windows\System32\Speech\SpeechUX\sapi.cpl  on your desktop. It would be good to pin this to the taskbar, but that's another gotcha:  apparently MS doesn't want it to be easy to pin just anything to the taskbar; I couldn't figure out how to do that. I have attached a copy of my shortcut; I hope this will work on others' computers.

*Maybe changing the restart requirement for this is not a technical hurdle, but perhaps the programmers just didn't think it was important. Perhaps a command "Refresh OS settings" could be devised.

EDIT: OK, so maybe forum software wipes links to oddly named files. I'll add a link for a zip file, instead.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dzf14xytm0j0kyg/sapi.cpl.zip?dl=0