v25 Speech Engine Voices

[JonS]

I updated to cortex 25 recently and the voice of announcements has changed from Stephanie Hawking to a slurred Marvin the paranoid android, aka Microsoft Sam. There is another voice, MS Anna, however its only for Vista and Win7, not XP that I am using. Seems it can be loaded with MS Streets and Tips, but its a 1Gig download and then only works for 60days...
the Speech SDK v5.1 gets a mention on wikipedia, but there are several versions. Has anyone successfully changed the voice in v25 on XP?

[Sichedelic]

I just went through this the other day. I installed mikemary.msi (which I found somewhere on the Interweb) and I now have Microsoft Mike & Mary keeping the kids entertained.

I don't have access to the history of the computer I downloaded the file on, but if you can't find it let me know and I'll make it available for download.

[JonS]

Thanks, found the file, not tried it yet. MS Sam is still novel.

[JonS]

After a while the novelty of MS Sam wore off so I decided to see if I could get the latest MS speech engine working under Windows XP... I could this is how:
>Download Microsoft Streets and Trips, it is 1.2GB, but came down at ~900kB/s so took just under 30 mins
>backup of disk image, database and system restore point
>Run the installation file
>>Phase 1, several minutes of unpacking
>>Phase 2, announced several components are missing, Option to install - OK
>>Phase 3, Option to start installation of main S&T application
>Used control panel to to set default speech engine to MS Anna
>In Cortex, Select Sound Object - Behaviour
>>Audio Option Tab
>>> English Engine Options
>>>> SAPI 5, Engine Selection, Speech Engines: select Microsoft Anna
> tested OK for me at this point

At some point I will uninstall all the other components that got installed at the same time to try and keep my controller set-up clean.

HTH