Reviving the long-abandoned Infovox 230 text-to-speech engine (Telia Promotor / Babel-Infovox, both defunct; the engine is public domain) as a self-contained synthesizer add-on for the NVDA screen reader — 60 voices across 12 languages, with no hardware dongle, no CrypKey, no 16-bit license manager, and no administrator rights required.
Languages: American & British English, German, French, Italian, Castilian Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic — each with five formant voices (Male, Female, Giant, Child, Zombie).
Grab the ready-to-install infovox230-0.1.nvda-addon from the
Releases page, then in NVDA: Tools → Add-on Store →
Install from external source, and restart when prompted. Full instructions are
in nvda-infovox230/README.md.
NVDA is 64-bit and cannot load the 32-bit Infovox SAPI4 engine in-process, which
is why these voices went silent. The add-on bridges that gap: the 64-bit NVDA
driver launches a bundled 32-bit host that hosts the engine and streams audio +
index marks back over a localhost socket. The engine binary is patched to run
free of its original dongle and license manager. The full reverse-engineering
write-up — including the exact binary patch offsets — is in
nvda-infovox230/ARCHITECTURE.md.
nvda-infovox230/— the add-on and its complete source: the NVDA driver, the 32-bit host, the bundled engine and rule sets, the 32-bit Python runtime, the Sx32w dongle-emulator stub, build/test tooling,ARCHITECTURE.md, and the builtinfovox230-0.1.nvda-addon.- Top-level files — the original Infovox 230 v2.2 installer
(
Infovox230v2_2complete.exe), its extracted contents (data1/,data2/, the*.IVXrule sets, the original*.exetools), and runtime DLLs. These are preserved for reproducibility so the patches can be re-derived from the originals. The same installer is also mirrored on the Internet Archive.
Mixed — see LICENSE for details. In short: the add-on code is
GPLv2; the Infovox engine, rule sets, and voice data are public domain and
included with permission; and the third-party components inside the original
installer (Microsoft runtimes, CrypKey, InstallShield) remain under their own
licenses and are included only as original installer materials.
Original engine and voices by Telia Promotor / Babel-Infovox AB (defunct). Revival, 64↔32-bit bridge, and NVDA add-on by the repository maintainer.