Determining available TTS engines on a platform

@Léonie Watson<mailto:lwatson@tetralogical.com> posted a question [1] on Mastodon over the weekend, and it resulted in some efforts to document what TTS voices are available to the WebSpeech API.  There were (at least) two coding efforts completed in response.  I will comment on mine [2], which I wrote before seeing [3]. I will admit that I have not taken to Mastodon yet, so I learned of Léonie’s enquiry via Adrian Roselli on Twitter and then later joined the Mastodon thread.

What I learned from this effort:


  1.  I was surprised by the large number of voices I had available on MacOS.
  2.  I was also surprised by inconsistencies in how some properties of the WebSpeech voice object were handled, notably default and voiceURI, across Chrome, Safari, and platform.
  3.  I can see a need for additional voice object properties to be included in WebSpeech.

I will put up a page on talkinginterfaces.org summarizing results of testing using my approach across MacOS, Windows, iOS, ChromeOS, and whatever Android I have available.  I posted my code on github [4].

Mark

[1] https://front-end.social/@tink/109967037206342798

[2] https://talkinginterfaces.org/webtts/listvoices.html

[3] https://speech-api-voices-gatherer.glitch.me/

[4] https://github.com/mhakkinen/listvoices



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