Use "Enhanced" and "Premium" built-in macOS voices when available
In macOS it's possible to download additional voices through the settings. Those voices offer a much more natural pronunciation compared to the basic versions at the cost of a larger file size. Even when those voices are downloaded, they are not available in the Readlang settings for premium users. If you could make those somehow available, it would mean a massive QoL improvement.
When available (not the case for all voices), the names of those voices are the name of the basic variant with " (Enhanced)" or " (Premium)" added to it, e.g. "Thomas (Enhanced)" or "Amélie (Premium)". Thanks!
themichiel
shared this idea
Thanks for the suggestion! I've just tried this and I managed to get the enhanced version of the Spanish voice Monica to show up in Google Chrome and Firefox, but for some reason not on Safari.
I also tried the installing the Spanish Siri voice but couldn't get that to show up in any browser.
Sorry I'm not sure exactly why this is the case, but I agree that offering a choice of more high quality voices would be good!
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matthew green commented
I read your post but i dont understand for your post because you dont mention what you want or offer to me. so first you will explain all the details about for your post.
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themichiel
commented
But to be honest with you, like many I much prefer to consume text with real native audio/video, so improvements to YouTube integration so that annotations are automatically extracted and synced would definitely be my #1 request.
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themichiel
commented
Thanks for the quick reply. I did some digging on my own and came to the conclusion that the SpeechSynthesis API is a complete mess. Apparently WebKit (Safari, and all iOS browsers) only allows for one voice per locale. This is why e.g. in french it only shows two voices; the super-compact versions of Amelie for fr-CA and Thomas for fr-FR. As far as I know there's no way to circumvent this limitation. Chrome can access all available system voices, but doesn't properly name different versions of the same voice. Firefox seems to handle it quite well, having all downloaded system voices available while also correctly naming "Enhanced" and "Premium" voices. Here's a little fiddle to play around with: https://jsfiddle.net/e30n1ds7/
As far as the Siri voices are concerned, Apple unfortunately has not made those available to third parties, so this means that iOS users are stuck with using low-quality voices for now, and macOS users can use firefox for the best experience. Quite unfortunate for me, as I like to read on my iPad, but it is what it is.