* Scottish Voices, Heather and Stuart<\/a>, plus Ceitidh for Gaelic. Educational non-commercial use only, and free — but registration is required<\/a>.<\/p>\n * There are no other free accented voices, such as Cornish or Brummie, so far as I can tell. But as the cost of developing a Sapi5 TTS voice comes down, via automation of the process, and as the systems that drive the voices make them sound less robotic, I foresee a future in which some distinctive British regions and cities develop and offer their own ‘voice’. (Update: there’s now a Black Country voice<\/a><\/em> and even a Glasgow voice).<\/p>\n There’s also Microsoft Hazel, a free British voice and better than the previous Microsoft British variants. This voice shipped as standard with Windows 8 and 8.1. The quickest way to tell if a Windows 8 user has it seems to be to install the best genuinely freeware TTS reader for Windows, Balabolka<\/a>.<\/p>\n If you don’t have Microsoft Hazel you may be able to get it from Windows Control Panel: Language Pack | Add a Language | Select | the wait until you see the “Download is ready…” link appear. (You can apparently also get a free French-accented Sapi5 voice, Hortense, this way. Just download the French language pack for Windows).<\/p>\n Balabolka’s “Direct Speech” and XML tags markup option can help you set up a stage-play -like script, in which there are different voices speaking in the same document. So you could, theoretically, have a Scot talking to someone from the Black Country. Here is an example of a coded script containing a few lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream<\/em>, and showing voice changes, pauses and pitch\/speed shifts…<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/spyders\/oldimages\/example.jpg\")
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