Benkyou Studio // International Language Study Toolkit

Adding Extra TTS Speech Synthesis Languages to Windows

Windows is always provided with Speech Synthesis for American English and your local Language, This means if you are an English speaker learning Japanese using a Japanese computer you will be OK.
However, if you are using an English PC your computer will not be able to speak Japanese without some work
Speech Synthesizers are 32 or 64 bit, so please ensure if your machine is 64 bit and your Speech synthesizer is 32 bit, you run the 32 bit version of Benkyou Studio - otherwise speech will not play even if it should.

Also, please be aware that speech will not play, or might be clipped during the quiz if your wordscore is high, this is because the quiz speeds up on words you are strong at to save time for words that are harder - this does not always leave time for speech to play.

Please note, the instructions here require registry editing, and require a skilled understanding of windows
If you are not confident doing this, do not continue, and Please backup your computer before proceeding,
I can take no responsibility if you follow these instructions and they do not work!

Windows XP / 7 Users

First you need to install the runtime from here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27225

Next you need to install language packs for the languages you are interested in from the site below:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27224

You need to do a registry patch to get them to work,
load Regedit, and browse to the path below:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech Server\v11.0\Voices\Tokens

You should see a voice for the language you just installed

Export it as a REG files

Open the Reg file in notepad, and use Search-Replace to find "Speech Server\v11.0" and replace it with "Speech"

Apply the reg file.

The voice should now appear in the control panel of speech synthesis, and work normally

If your machine is 64 bit, repeat the procedure on the path:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Speech Server\v11.0\Voices\Tokens
(this is used by 32 bit apps)

This method is based on the explanation at this site:
https://superuser.com/questions/590779/how-to-install-more-voices-to-windows-speech

Windows 10 Users

For windows 10, I couldn't find how to download the packs, there maybe an option in the language Setting page but I couldn't find it when I tried, I installed a free trial of the foreign Win10 OS, and copied the foreign speech files from that VM onto my real pc.

The Voice pack files are in...
C:\Windows\Speech\Engines\TTS

The RegKeys are in...
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SPEECH\Voices\Tokens\

Export the reg folder, and copy the files and regkeys to the machine your real machine, it should work fine.

More Information
There is various info on Text to speech which may help you at at http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/

Setting Up TTS in windows XP/7:

Export the RegKeys from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\Speech Server\v11.0\ Voices\Tokens

Replace "Speech Server\v11.0" with "Speech" and apply the regfile

Setting Up TTS in windows 10:

From a machine that has the language you want, copy the files in C:\Windows\Speech\Engines\TTS

Then export the regfiles from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\SPEECH\Voices\Tokens\,
These will allow you to translplant the voice on your Win10 machine