"You’ve got mail" voice
Yesterday’s post got several responses with questions about a “You’ve got mail” voice. Some people would like to know how to turn it on and others would like to know how to turn it off.
Outlook and Windows do not ship with a “You’ve got mail” voice by default. If you’ve got this voice, it probably is because of additional software that is installed on your system. If you’d like to have this voice, you can add it by changing your Windows’ Sounds Scheme or by setting up a rule in Outlook.
Turn off the voice
When you have this voice, you probably have a Toshiba computer with the Toshiba Speech System software on it. Amongst others, this software will allow you to have your mail be read out loud for you. By default it is also configured to notify you of new emails when you receive it by saying “You’ve got mail” and when starting Outlook it will inform you of remaining unread mails in your Inbox by saying “You’ve got # unread mails”.
To turn these notifications off, use Tools-> Reading Options… and disable the “Inform mail receiving” option.
To disable this Toshiba add-in completely in Outlook, you can disable the Exchange Client Extension called “Mail Speak (TOSHIBA)”.
To get rid of the software completely, uninstall the following 3 applications via Control Panel;
- TOSHIBA Speech System Applications
- TOSHIBA Speech System SR Engine <language> <version>
- TOSHIBA Speech System TTS Engine <language> <version>
Turn on the voice
If you don’t have a Toshiba computer but you’d like to have a “You’ve got mail” voice when receiving an email, you can change the default Windows sound for “New Mail Notification”.
To change your Sound Scheme in Windows choose;
- Windows XP; Category View
Start-> Control Panel-> Sounds, Speech, and Audio Devices-> Change the sound scheme - Windows XP; Classis View
Start-> Control Panel-> Sounds and Audio Devices-> tab Sounds - Windows Vista and Windows 7
Start-> Control Panel-> Hardware and Sound-> section Sound-> Change system sounds
You can use pretty much any wav-file for this. There are many to choose from within Windows already. To get a specific “You’ve got mail” voice I’d recommend doing a search on the Internet with you favorite search engine such as Google or Bing for the phrase; you’ve got mail sound
If you’d like to get started right away, I’ve got a sound clip for you which you can download here.
Note: If you do not want to have this voice sound for every new email that you receive, you can setup a rule so that it will only sound under specific conditions. For details, see this post.
