Immersive Reader is part of Microsoft Learning Tools and is designed to improve reading support for learners with literacy difficulties, such as dyslexia.(You can buy the voices for your Android device from the Google Play Store for 59p each for iPad the situation is more complex because Apple hasn't licenced the voices yet and they have to be built into each app by the app developers, which hasn't happened.) Microsoft Office Immersive Reader and Learning Tools The voices are created by CereProc and are available for Windows and MacOS from CALL's Scottish Voice web site for use by learners in school, further and higher education in Scotland, and by NHS patients. However, Heather was very well received and was followed by Stuart, the world's first male Scottish computer voice, in 2011 and then Ceitidh, the world's first Scottish Gaelic voice, in 2015.

At the time, there were very few options and most computers in schools ran Microsoft Windows and offered a choice of Microsoft Sam or Mary, both of which had American accents and were much more robotic compared to today's voices. The original reason for licencing the Scottish Heather voice was because our research into Digital examination papers in 2005 found that learners were not enthusiastic about the computer voices that were available on their computers ( Nisbet, 2012). (Mind you, we don't have any research to back this up - we get feedback that learners and staff like the Scottish voices because they are more familiar and because it's helpful to hear the computer or device reading with a Scottish accent and intonation - but we have no evidence that accessing text with the Scottish voices leads to improved comprehension or engagement compared with, say, English or American accents.) We think it's really important that learners have the option to use a computer voice with a local accent, and to have a choice of male as well as female voices.

With Learning Tools and Immersive Reader, Microsoft Office 365 has some really good features for supporting reading, but there's some confusion about whether and how you can use the free Scottish computer voices - here's my understanding of the situation.

Microsoft desktop voices 2015