if you save it in Notepad instead of word, you can choose a whole lot of different formats in the save dialog. Have you tried using the -vhi tag so that it uses hindi instead of english? as per this document? http://espeak.sourceforge.net/languages.html
Okay, it turns out the program was creating UTF-16 txt files, where espeak can apparently only read UTF-8 text files. Once I changed the encoding it worked.
if I use the command: espeak "hello world" it works fine. If I save "hello world" into a text file and read that using the command: espeak -f "c:\test.txt" it reads it one character at a time as though spelling it out. This used to work in windows 7 32bit, but after updating to windows 10 64bit, I'm now getting this strange error. Any idea what could be causing this?