Voice-over Helper - match genders?

[Winterblood]

Hi - just trying out the VO helper, which seems to be ENORMOUSLY useful.
One niggle - the tutorial video generates female TTS WAVs, while my local copy generates male WAVs.
Could the system generate WAVs that match the designated gender of the speaker?

[[Articy] Nico Probst]

Hi Winterblood,

Yes it sure could! It basically uses the Microsofts TextToSpeech engine for that. The voices you can have in the engine are dictated by what you have installed on the computer. And when Karsten made our tutorial video, his PC only had a female voice installed.
For the release i just set the gender hint to "Neutral", those hints are are used to let the system Select an appropriate voice. We didn't intend to do anything further with those dummy files, so for our purpose of the plugin this was enough. But you can just as easily take the source and change that part. But remember, the text to speech engine can only use the voices that you have installed.

The interesting part for your should be the CreateTextToSpeechFile method inside WaveFileHelper.cs:103. You could pass in the Speaker Object and take the information out of the template and change the VoiceGener accordingly, you could even adjust the age

Hope that helps

Best regards

Nico

[unisip]

Is there any chance you might update the voice over plugin to support the current culture of the OS for voice generation ? Right now all my french dialogues are generated with a US voice, which is kind of funky.

I tried to load the source of the plugin in Visual Studio 2017 to make the change myself, but couldn't compile it (for some reason all the references are missing, although I see the packages in the project folder, including the Articy MacroDevKit). I might be doing something wrong with Visual Studio, but I can't get to resolve those references...