Windows 10 comes with excellent text-to-speech support and different high-quality voices. To find out which voices are available, try this:
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.speech $synthesizer = New-Object System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer $synthesizer.GetInstalledVoices().VoiceInfo | Where-Object { $_.Name -notlike 'Microsoft Server*' } | Select-Object -Property Name, Gender, Age, Culture
The result looks similar to this (and depends on your Windows version, culture, and installed components):
Name Gender Age Culture ---- ------ --- ------- Microsoft Zira Desktop Female Adult en-US Microsoft David Desktop Male Adult en-US Microsoft Hedda Desktop Female Adult de-DE
To try out these voices, use SelectVoice():
$sampleText = @{ [System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::GetCultureInfo("en-us") = "Hello, I am speaking English! I am " [System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::GetCultureInfo("de-de") = "Halli Hallo, man spricht deutsch hier! Ich bin " [System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::GetCultureInfo("es-es") = "Una cerveza por favor! Soy " [System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::GetCultureInfo("fr-fr") = "Vive la france! Je suis " [System.Globalization.CultureInfo]::GetCultureInfo("it-it") = "Il mio hovercraft è pieno di anguille! Lo sono " } Add-Type -AssemblyName System.speech $synthesizer = New-Object System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer $synthesizer.GetInstalledVoices().VoiceInfo | Where-Object { $_.Name -notlike 'Microsoft Server*' } | Select-Object -Property Name, Gender, Age, Culture | ForEach-Object { $_ $synthesizer.SelectVoice($_.Name) $synthesizer.Speak($sampleText[$_.Culture] + $_.Name) }
The voices available to you depend on the languages you installed. Here is a link explaining the voices that ship with Windows 10 for different languages:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/22797/windows-10-narrator-tts-voices. Note that not all of the installed voices are available via SelectVoice().
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