Product Name: WYNN, TestTalker, OpenBook

Version: Any

Topic: When you start WYNN, TestTalker, or OpenBook, a dialog box asks you to select a speech engine

Details:

This dialog box appears because there is more than one speech engine installed on your computer, and the program cannot determine which one to use. This is most frequently caused by having multiple versions of the ViaVoice synthesizer installed on the same computer. WYNN, TestTalker, and OpenBook do not all use the same version of ViaVoice. In addition, software from other companies may use other versions of ViaVoice, and some products have other speech synthesizers.

Solution:

If there are multiple versions of ViaVoice installed by different Freedom Scientific programs, each program creates a separate Viavol.ini file. Start each program. One of the programs should start without displaying the dialog box. Look in that program's folder and find the file Viavol.ini. Copy this file to the folders where you installed your other Freedom Scientific products. Then copy the file to your Windows (or WINNT) folder.

The previous versions of WYNN, and the latest versions of TestTalker use IBM ViaVoice 5.0. The latest version of OpenBook and WYNN use ViaVoice 6.43. The line that gets inserted into the Viavol.ini by version 5.0 of ViaVoice is:

    Engine=ViaVoice Outloud 5.0

ViaVoice 6.43 inserts a different line:

    Engine=IBM ViaVoice Text-to-Speech

Additional Information:
You may need to modify the Ssilsapi.ini file in the program's installation folder in addition to the Viavol.ini file. If the Ssilsapi.ini file exists (it is only created in certain circumstances), its contents should be identical to the Viavol.ini file's contents.

If you want to make another SAPI synthesizer the default instead of ViaVoice, edit the "engine=" line of the Ssilsapi.ini file to include that synthesizer's name instead of ViaVoice.

If none of these text strings works after the "engine=" line, find the exact text string by looking in the registry, in the Name column of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, Software, Voice, TextToSpeech, Engine. For example, to use RealSpeak, that line might read "L&H RealSpeak V1.0" Be sure to use the exact text, including spaces, that is in shown in the registry.