Your application can use the system default voice to generate speech or it can specify that the Speech Manager use a particular voice that is available on the current computer system. A voice is a set of characteristics defined in parameters that specify a particular quality of speech. Just as different people's voices have different tonal qualities, so too can different voices have different qualities. A synthesized voice might sound male or female and might sound like an adult or a child.
Some voices sound distinctively synthetic, while others sound more like real people.
Figure 4-2 shows how the Speech Manager uses speech channels to synthesize speech with different voices. As speech-synthesizing technology develops, the voices that your application can access are likely to sound more and more human. Each voice is designed to work with a particular speech synthesizer and can be customized in specific ways to create different effects. Voices are usually stored in one of three places. The Speech Manager will first look in the application's resources file chain when attempting to locate a voice specification record.