VoiceInfo Class

Represents an installed Runtime Language for speech synthesis.

Inheritance Hierarchy

System.Object
  Microsoft.Speech.Synthesis.VoiceInfo

Namespace:  Microsoft.Speech.Synthesis
Assembly:  Microsoft.Speech (in Microsoft.Speech.dll)

Syntax

'Declaration
<SerializableAttribute> _
Public NotInheritable Class VoiceInfo
'Usage
Dim instance As VoiceInfo

[SerializableAttribute]
public sealed class VoiceInfo

Remarks

A voice is an installed Runtime Language for speech synthesis (TTS, or text-to-speech). The Microsoft Speech Platform Runtime 11 and Microsoft Speech Platform SDK 11 do not include any Runtime Languages for speech synthesis. You must download and install a Runtime Language for each language in which you want to generate synthesized speech. A Runtime Language includes the language model, acoustic model, and other data necessary to provision a speech engine to perform speech synthesis in a particular language. See InstalledVoice for more information.

The SpeechSynthesizer object uses a voice to generate speech from text. The properties of the VoiceInfo object identify a voice and describe its characteristics. The most defining characteristic of a voice is its Culture, which defines the single language that a voice can speak.

The Voice property returns a VoiceInfo object that contains information about the current voice in use by the SpeechSynthesizer. You can also use a VoiceInfo object to get information about any of the voices that are installed on the system, as returned by the GetInstalledVoices() method. See InstalledVoice for more information.

Examples

The following example is part of a console application that initializes a SpeechSynthesizer object and outputs to the console a list of the installed voices and demonstrates the information that is available for each voice.

using System;
using Microsoft.Speech.Synthesis;
using Microsoft.Speech.AudioFormat;

namespace SampleSynthesis
{
  class Program
  {
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {

      // Initialize a new instance of the SpeechSynthesizer.
      using (SpeechSynthesizer synth = new SpeechSynthesizer())
      {

        // Output information about all of the installed voices. 
        Console.WriteLine("Installed voices -");
        foreach (InstalledVoice voice in synth.GetInstalledVoices())
        {
          VoiceInfo info = voice.VoiceInfo;
          string AudioFormats = "";
          foreach (SpeechAudioFormatInfo fmt in info.SupportedAudioFormats)
          {
            AudioFormats += String.Format("{0}\n",
            fmt.EncodingFormat.ToString());
          }

          Console.WriteLine(" Name:          " + info.Name);
          Console.WriteLine(" Culture:       " + info.Culture);
          Console.WriteLine(" Age:           " + info.Age);
          Console.WriteLine(" Gender:        " + info.Gender);
          Console.WriteLine(" Description:   " + info.Description);
          Console.WriteLine(" ID:            " + info.Id);
          Console.WriteLine(" Enabled:       " + voice.Enabled);
          if (info.SupportedAudioFormats.Count != 0)
          {
            Console.WriteLine( " Audio formats: " + AudioFormats);
          }
          else
          {
            Console.WriteLine(" No supported audio formats found");
          }

          string AdditionalInfo = "";
          foreach (string key in info.AdditionalInfo.Keys)
          {
            AdditionalInfo += String.Format("  {0}: {1}\n", key, info.AdditionalInfo[key]);
          }

          Console.WriteLine(" Additional Info - " + AdditionalInfo);
          Console.WriteLine();
        }
      }
      Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit...");
      Console.ReadKey();
    }
  }
}

Thread Safety

Any public static (Shared in Visual Basic) members of this type are thread safe. Any instance members are not guaranteed to be thread safe.

See Also

Reference

VoiceInfo Members

Microsoft.Speech.Synthesis Namespace