If the Microsoft TTS5.1 speech system is installed on your system, then you have the "Sam" voice, and also possibly the voices of "Mike" and "Mary", ready to use in the MeggieSoft Games.  (If you do not have TTS5.1 installed, or you only have Sam's voice, see "Speech Systems" for download information.)

These three voices provided by Microsoft are of very good quality, but exhibit some of the flat robotic sound that historically has been common in most mechanical speech.  The limiting factors in providing better quality speech rendition include the processing power and disk storage requirements.

You can now obtain considerably more realistic voices for use with the TTS5.1 speech system.  These possess almost no robotic nuances and are usually more fluid with more realistic sentence stress.  They do however require many megabytes of disk storage, and a 300MHz or faster processor is recommended if you wish to use them.  Some of them will add a slight initialization delay to the start-up speed of the games.

There are a number of original manufacturers of these voices, including: AT&T Natural Voices™, NeoSpeech™, and Cepstral®.  Voices from all of these sources have been tested with the MeggieSoft Games, with impressive results.  Of course, if you purchase these voices, they are available to all other text-to-speech programs on your computer - their use is not limited to the MeggieSoft Games.

Our affiliate in making these additional voice capabilities available to you is NextUp.com, the creators of TextAloud - "the world's most popular Text To Speech tool".  Please click the "Get More Voices" button below for more information and to purchase your choice of high-quality voices.

If you would like to hear a sample of a short sequence of MeggieSoft Games phrases using AT&T Natural Voices™, please download the wav file sample from the "Speech Systems" page.