Excellent clear British SAPI5 TTS voices for short animations and tutorials are Ivona Voice 1.6 Amy 22kHz (aka Ivona 2 Amy). The other is the less common Neospeech Voiceware Bridget (demo). Yes, they’re still robo voices, but I’d say they’re the most pleasing and human of the female British voices released in the 2010s for SAPI5. And you can’t argue with free and offline. No subscriptions or data-gouging needed (though Eleven Labs are the best, if you want that). Both voices are now free on Archive.org, and work with the free Balabolka. Here’s how to control them with some simple markup.
1. Amy can be controlled using the normal SAPI markup (SSML) in the Balabolka editor. She also supports phenomes (visimes) symbols, a prosidy markup tag, and others.
2. Neospeech Voiceware Bridget however does not support phenomes, prosidy etc and requires the following XML tags to add pauses and emphasis…
Add ! or ?! to inflect and emote a word at the end of a sentence…
Also working as XML tags with Bridget…
No closing tag is needed for the following milliseconds pause tag…
Incidentally, Neospeech Voiceware Bridget shows up in Balbolka as “VW Bridget English (United States)”, when she should be “VW Bridget English (British, upper class)”.