themichiel
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1 vote
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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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.
themichiel
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123 votes
This isn't exactly what you're asking for, but 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!
(I also like the idea of being able to upload audio files with real human voices, and am…
themichiel
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27 votesthemichiel
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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.