Voice Attack cannot find working speech engine

[Vlodec]

Running as Admin seems to have fixed the issue for now. Thanks guys.

[alterNERDtive]

I randomly started running into the same problem after a reboot yesterday and have been almost tearing my hair out over it.

Running VA as admin is a working bandaid, but not an acceptable long-term fix IMO. Both because I don’t like running stuff with elevated privileges and I want other tools to run VA commands through the command line and that obviously fails unless they are run with admin privileges too then … Now sadly this seems to indeed be some weird permission issue and not a VA bug per sé … still, if you can find any way to fix it properly it would be great.

Side note, I have another .Net tool for TTS error out with

System.PlatformNotSupportedException: No voice installed on the system or none available with the current security setting.

which appears to be a permission issue, too; haven’t used that one in ages and just dug it out for testing though so I can’t say if it worked yesterday. Sadly googling the error message wasn’t much of a help.

[Vlodec]

Just ran the update and that seems to have fixed it.

🙂

[alterNERDtive]

Well I have been on 1.8.2 since before the problem even occurred.

[Gary]

I randomly started running into the same problem after a reboot yesterday and have been almost tearing my hair out over it.

@alterNERDtive - It's really kind of weird that it's happening randomly.  I'm wondering if it's the same exception or something else.  IIRC, the exception should also be written to your VoiceAttackFault.txt file (and also your Windows event log).  Could you take a look in your installation directory and see if there's a VoiceAttackFault.txt file in there, and if so, could you post it here or send over to support@voiceattack.com?

[alterNERDtive]

It’s not written to that file. I just get the attached window and then a “VoiceAttack must now close” prompt. Nothing is appended to the VoicaAttackFault.txt file.

As far as I can tell there’s also nothing in the Windows event log, but I’ve literally never used that before so I might be missing something.

[Gary]

That is a different message than what these guys are getting, actually.  The message the other guys are getting has more information in it, as it is a result of an exception being thrown by the speech component and caught by VA.  What you are seeing is VA asking Windows to enumerate its available speech engines and Windows is saying it doesn't have any (the component did not raise an exception).  This looks like a VA problem, but with v1.8.2, VA is now using .Net framework v4.7.2, and your system is now touching on components that probably have not been accessed before
 now.

What do you have selected in the Options screen,  System/Advanced tab for the speech engine?  Did you install any speech engines or are you using the one built in?

If you are using the built-in speech engine, 'Use Built-in SAPI speech Engines' will be selected.  Otherwise it will be, 'Use installed Speech Platform Speech Engines'.

In either case, an intermittent/random message like that is totally abnormal (this would be the first I've seen of that in over ten years) and is indicative of a system issue outside of VA's control.   If you are using an installed speech engine, you'll want to try uninstalling and reinstalling BOTH the speech platform and the speech engine(s).  If you are using the built-in speech engine, you'll want to try doing a system file scan (assuming Win10):  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4026529/windows-10-using-system-file-checker       
^^^This is good to do from time to time - actually, you should probably do this regardless of what type of speech engine you are using

[alterNERDtive]

This looks like a VA problem, but with v1.8.2, VA is now using .Net framework v4.7.2, and your system is now touching on components that probably have not been accessed before now.

Well it worked fine with 1.8.2. Until it didn’t

What do you have selected in the Options screen,  System/Advanced tab for the speech engine? Did you install any speech engines or are you using the one built in?

Built in. Never installed anything speech-related apart from windows language packs + speech data.

If you are using the built-in speech engine, you'll want to try doing a system file scan (assuming Win10):  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4026529/windows-10-using-system-file-checker

I’ve actually done that already. I’ve been looking to fix that issue for a couple hours before coming here

And just to make sure you haven’t missed that part, it’s working “fine” now with Admin privileges, but I’d like it to, you know, not have them.

[alterNERDtive]

So … you’re probably going to like this less than I do, but I’ve been periodically trying to run VA without admin rights, and after today’s reboot it suddenly worked again.

No Windows updates, no software installed/deleted, no new hardware, nothing changed. Except that it magically worked again.

[Gary]

I might have a solution (that is, not just running as admin) for this in the next couple of days - possible a beta this evening.

[alterNERDtive]

Cool. I’ll gladly run the beta – though as I’ve said the problem has currently decided not to present itself.