Text to Speach audio option along with the text
It would be very useful to be able to hear the text (not only single words), maybe using a TTS synthesiser like the one that now pronounces single words. It would be great to let Readlang speak a selected phrase or even the entire text, making it a sort of audiobook with both text and audio. It would improve a lot the learning experience for those who want to improve the pronunciation and speech recognition, along with the reading abilities.
Dario
shared this idea
I've just added a "Read Aloud" feature using synthetic voices. If your browser supports it, you'll see a play/pause button at the bottom of the reader page which, when clicked, will read the text out loud, highlighting the current word being spoken. This is only available if your browser supports locally generated text-to-speech on the device you are using.
This was only added last night, so if you have a Readlang tab already open, please refresh it to get access to the new feature. And if you notice any bugs, please let me know!
The feature is available to all Readlang users, and Premium users are additionally able to customize the voice in the "AA" sidebar tab.
Please let me know what you think!
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Roberto Nerici
commented
Thanks for the nice addition. I'm using it as part of flashcard reviewing. I'm used to it with a memrise deck I also use and it makes the flashcard part of readlang seem a more rounded experience.
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Thanks Dario,
Currently I use a Microsoft service for the text-to-speech which seems to work very well, but it wouldn't be feasible for whole texts since I'd need to pay per character.
If I implemented whole text playback it would probably need to use the browser's built in text-to-speech. The problem here is lack of consistency between different browsers. And for Spanish within Chrome in particular, I find Google's voice sounds much worse than the Microsoft one I'm currently using.
It's not going to work on this in the immediate future, but long term it's certainly a possibility.
Steve
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Dario
commented
Yes, I tried it a bit and it works well. So, the only possible feature one could add to the actual system is the ability to start playing the reader (a "play button") so that it continues to play until one stops it (a "pause" button), this way it would become a sort of audiobook to follow alongside the written text.