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6.7 Choose Voices And Speech Engines ¶

Four terms help when adjusting voices:

• A logical voice expresses a purpose such as boldening, annotation, or a heading distinction without naming one synthesizer voice.
• A voice palette gives named logical voices portable style characteristics. Palettes can inherit from another palette and travel between machines.
• A physical voice is an actual voice reported by an installed speech engine. Its exact identifier is usually machine-local.
• An engine route decides which engine and physical voice realize a logical voice on the current machine.

Use the Voice Palettes manager when you want to choose or edit the portable style vocabulary. Press RET on a palette to browse its voices, preview them before editing, and use a in the palette manager to activate a selected palette. Built-in palettes remain intact; editing can create a personal copy.

Use Voice Workbench when the question involves installed voices, engines, or routes. Open it from Aural Home with W. Its main views are:

l

Logical voices and their current routes.

v

Physical voices reported by the engines.

e

Engines, preference, fallback, and health.

s

Portable styles and effects.

Press P to preview a row, A to preview all visible voices, B to compare two, and S to stop preview. Use a to assign a physical voice and t to tune the selected logical voice on its effective route. Route changes are staged until you press w or C-c C-c to save and apply them. Pressing q with unsaved route changes warns that they remain staged.

For a quick engine preference, C-e d e chooses an available engine for the current Emacs session. Press C-u first to save the new preference. Explicit logical-voice routes still take precedence.

Judge voices in context. The goal is usually to distinguish nearby kinds of content, not to identify every named voice in isolation. Use a portable palette for the intended distinction and machine routing for the best local realization.