Why won't Microsoft.Speech's Chinese Voices speak on Win7 Embedded?

Question

I am trying to get text-to-speech working on my Windows Embedded Standard 7 (WES7) image.  I am using the Microsoft Speech Platform, version 11, to do this.

My development system is Windows 7 x64.  On this, I have installed both the 32- and 64-bit SDKs, the platform runtime, and all of the voices.

My target system is a WES7 32-bit system with a 2+ GHz CPU, 2GB RAM, plenty of disk space, etc.  It exceeds the system requirements for the MS Speech Platform.  On this, I have installed the platform runtime, and all of the voices.

I wrote a small MFC test app to prove that I can use the Microsoft Speech Platform from MFC.  I will be adding text-to-speech to a bigger MFC test app later.  This test app is working beautifully on my development system: all voices work.  However, when I run this same test app on my target WES7 system, all voices work except the three Chinese voices ().

To remedy this, I have tried installing ALL of the WES7 language packs and speech packs, but that didn't help.  I also applied all available Windows Updates to the system, but that didn't help either.

It seems like I might be missing some component, but I'm not sure what that might be.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

I also tried writing a SAPI 5.4 app (re-using the same front-end as the other app, just tying in to the different SDK/DLL), and that works nicely. The problem with that is it only seems to support two voices: one for US English, the other for Chinese. I can't use this technology, though, because I need voices in about twelve different languages.

Regards,

Jethro

Answer 1

I got it working!!

I was able to find a different WES7 image in house on which my test app was able to speak with all voices, including the Chinese voices.  So, I dumped the packages on both systems, and figured out which packages were on the working system but not the other.  I added those packages, and now all voices can be used to speak.

I'm not sure which package(s) actually caused enabled the Chinese voices to work, but I installed a bunch.  They are:

WinEmb-PremiumCodecs-DOLBY-AC3-AudioEncoder~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-INF-igdlh~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-INF-msdv~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-Search~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-Accessibility~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-RemoteAssistance~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-INF-kscaptur~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-Fax-Scan~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-IIS~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-Networking-Bluetooth~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-Networking-TelnetServer~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-Security-SecureStartUp~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-INF-tpm~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-INF-usbcir~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-INF-faxcn002~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385

WinEmb-INF-faxca003~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.7600.16385 Regards, Jethro

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- Brought to you by Jethro Bodine

Answer 2

Thank you for posting this; it really helped me out.  It's great that you followed up on your issue and posted the solution.  I could not get any voices to work in WES7 (not even the standard Anna voice).

It seems that adding Feature Pack>>User Interface>>Microsoft Speech API (and its dependencies) is not sufficient to actually make text-to-speech work in WES7.  Microsoft may have missed a dependency somewhere.

I can confirm that, for whatever reason, adding the packages you listed above (and their dependencies) makes text-to-speech start working.  Those are such a random assortment of packages, none of which sound like they would have anything to do with speech.

I don't know which one in particular does the trick, but I can confirm that, on their own, Accessibility and the AC3 audio encoder do not help (I had those already and TTS didn't work).  

Once I added your list of packages and TTS was working, I removed Remote Assistance, Fax and Scan, Bitlocker Secure Startup, and Windows Search, and it still worked.

Ideally it would be nice to further narrow down the list of packages, but I've spent 2 days on this now, so I'm just going to stick with what works (even though it clutters up my WES7 image with some items I know I don't need or want). 

Thanks again!