How do I get free voices for different languages from Microsoft?

August 17, 2020

In addition to the Acapela and Nuance voices, you can use Windows voices in Snap.  Not including US English, there are 48 additional languages that you can download from Microsoft just from Windows Settings.  You may want to check these out before purchasing additional voices.  The list of languages can be found in the table below.

 

Voice Languages

Arabic (Egypt) Arabic (Saudi Arabia) Bulgarian
Catalan Chinese (Simplified, China) Chinese (Traditional, Hong Kong SAR)
Chinese (Traditional Taiwan) Croatian (Croatia) Czech
Danish Dutch (Belgium) Dutch (Netherlands)
English (Australia) English (Canada) English (India)
English (Ireland) English (United Kingdom) English (United States)
Finnish French (Canada) French (France)
French (Switzerland) German (Austria) German (Germany)
German (Switzerland) Greek Hebrew
Hindi Hungarian Indonesian
Italian (Italy) Japanese Korean
Malay (Malaysia) Norwegian (Bokmal) Polish
Portuguese (Brazil) Portuguese (Portugal) Romanian (Romania)
Russian Slovak Slovenian
Spanish (Mexico) Spanish (Spain) Swedish (Sweden)
Tamil (India) Thai Turkish
Vietnamese    

Adding the voices above does not change the language of the app, nor does it change the Snap keyboard.  . 

To add one of the voices from the table above to Snap please follow these instructions...
  1. Close Snap Core First
  2. Open Windows Settings
  3. Choose Time & Language
  4. Select Language
  5. Under Preferred languages choose Add a language
  6. Scroll down the list to search for the language you need.  The language must have an symbol like this to the right in order to be used with text-to-speech.    As long as it is one of the languages in the chart above, you should be fine.
  7. Select the language and choose Next.
  8. Make sure "Install language pack" and "Text-to-speech" are selected.
  9. Choose Install
  10. You will see the language will begin downloading.  Once it has completed you may close Windows Settings.
  11. Open Snap Core First and go into Settings then choose User.
  12. Choose Voice, the Speaking voice
  13. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the list and choose Windows voices
  14. You will see the voice you chose.  Unfortunately for many of the Windows languages there is only one voice to choose from.  That voice may be male or female and always adult.  Select the voice and choose Done.  If you'd like you can play the sample before selecting Done to make sure the voice is loaded and speaks.
If you want to use this voice with your current Snap Core First language, that's all you need to do.