UWP XAML ToggleSwitch to set Speech Synthesis voice to either male or female

Question

I am trying to set the voice.gender to either male or female via a ToggleSwitch within the setting page in Template10 UWP app.

I declare the TG:

<ToggleSwitch x:Name="VoiceSelection" Header="Select Voice"
                                  IsOn="{Binding VoiceChoice, Mode=TwoWay}"
                                  OffContent="Male Voice" OnContent="Female Voice" />

That should be fine.

I then set a boolean, that will be use to select male or female later

public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;
public static bool _voiceChoice = true;
public bool VoiceChoice
    {
        get
        {
            return _voiceChoice;
        }
        set
        {
            _voiceChoice = value;
            OnPropertyChanged("VoiceChoice");
        }
    }

protected void OnPropertyChanged(string name)
    {
        PropertyChanged?.Invoke(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(name));
    }

For info, here is the code that later assign the voice. That works fine too.

...
if (_voiceChoice == true)
                {
                    VoiceInformation voiceInfo =
                      (
                        from voice in SpeechSynthesizer.AllVoices
                        where voice.Gender == VoiceGender.Female
                        select voice
                      ).FirstOrDefault() ?? SpeechSynthesizer.DefaultVoice;
                    synthesizer.Voice = voiceInfo;
                    stream = await synthesizer.SynthesizeTextToStreamAsync(text);
                }
                else
...

Problem i have is I can select the voice by manually setting the boolean _voiceChoice, but I cannot set via the ToggleSwitch.

I also realize that this solution is not very clean, and I am open to any suggestions. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

What do you mean by "cannot set via ToggleSwitch"? Is there an error? Is the setter of the property not being called? — Martin Zikmund, Jul 17 '16 at 06:47
If you set the breakpoint in the property setter and swith the toggle, does the breakpoint get hit? — Martin Zikmund, Jul 17 '16 at 06:51
Is your DataContext set? Bindings don't work without datacontext — DotNetRussell, Jul 17 '16 at 12:27

Franck E · Accepted Answer · 2016-08-07T23:46:03.113

Actually, I was looking at this completely wrongly.
Here is what is needed to make a working ToggleSwitch to switch between male/female voice in Template10. May be cleaner solutions, but this works.

In SettingsPage.xaml, add:

<ToggleSwitch x:Name="VoiceSelection" Header="Select Voice"
    IsOn="{Binding UseVoiceSelection, Mode=TwoWay}"
    OffContent="Male Voice" OnContent="Female Voice" />

In SettingsService.cs, add:

public bool UseVoiceSelection
    {
        get { return _helper.Read<bool>(nameof(UseVoiceSelection), true); }
        set
        {
            _helper.Write(nameof(UseVoiceSelection), value);
        }
    }

In the class SettingsPartViewModel : ViewModelBase, add:

public bool UseVoiceSelection
    {
        get { return _settings.UseVoiceSelection; }
        set { _settings.UseVoiceSelection = value; base.RaisePropertyChanged(); }
    }

Finally, in a separate class, set the bool value and perform the speech synthesis:

public class ReadSpeech
{
    public static bool _voiceChoice = true;

    // Performs synthesis
    async Task<IRandomAccessStream> SynthesizeTextToSpeechAsync(string text)
    {
        IRandomAccessStream stream = null;
        using (SpeechSynthesizer synthesizer = new SpeechSynthesizer())
        {
            if (temp.SettingsPartViewModel.UseVoiceSelection == true)
            {
                VoiceInformation voiceInfo =
                  (
                    from voice in SpeechSynthesizer.AllVoices
                    where voice.Gender == VoiceGender.Female
                    select voice
                  ).FirstOrDefault() ?? SpeechSynthesizer.DefaultVoice;
                synthesizer.Voice = voiceInfo;
                stream = await synthesizer.SynthesizeTextToStreamAsync(text);
            }
            else
            {
                VoiceInformation voiceInfo =
                  (
                    from voice in SpeechSynthesizer.AllVoices
                    where voice.Gender == VoiceGender.Male
                    select voice
                  ).FirstOrDefault() ?? SpeechSynthesizer.DefaultVoice;
                synthesizer.Voice = voiceInfo;
                stream = await synthesizer.SynthesizeTextToStreamAsync(text);
            }
        }
        return (stream);
    }

UWP XAML ToggleSwitch to set Speech Synthesis voice to either male or female

1 Answers1