This tip may not have much practical use for day-to-day Windows home users, except for impressing your kids or playing a prank, but for software developers, the use of the Microsoft Speech API can be pretty useful, to make their applications speak out if necessary. The Microsoft Speech API is built into the Windows operating system and is used in speech recognition and text-to-speech, making speech technology more accessible and robust for a wide range of Windows applications.
Make Windows Talk to you
To make your Windows computer talk to you, open Notepad and paste the following code in it:
Dim message, sapi
message=InputBox("Enter the text you want read","Read This")
Set sapi=CreateObject("sapi.spvoice")
sapi.Speak message
Give it a name say, Read This.vbs and select All Files for the Save as type and Save it.
Now when you click open this VB Script file, you will see the following box. You can enter your text in the input space and click on OK.
There is, however, a limit of around 130 characters. Beyond that, the message will be cut off.
Your Windows will now read out to you, the text you pasted. If you use Windows 11/10/8, you will probably hear Microsoft David talk. If you are using Windows 7 or Windows Vista, it must be Microsoft Anna.
Using the same feature, you can also make Microsoft Outlook read out emails for you. Not only MS Outlook, but you can make other applications in MS Office read out the selected text with just one click.
I hope you enjoyed this trick.
You might want to check out these posts too!
- Make Windows Welcome you With an Audio Voice Message During Logon
- Make Windows speak out the time every hour.
