Chrome TTS Voices

[Sam K]

I've been having a look at the "chrome.tts" API recently and I've a
query about available voices. From what I understand, to use anything
other than the native voice you must install another voice as a
separate extension (there are a few available in the Web Store at the
moment). Currently, they all seem to be English - unless anyone
happens to know of any voices available outside of the Web Store.

Having a glance at the Google Translate service, Google obviously have
additional voices in additional languages but I am curious as to
whether these voices (for different languages) will be made available
as separate extensions or whether the API is limited to English at the
minute?

I may be completely missing something, but I've tried the demo app and
my own extension (using various internationalised versions of Windows
and Chrome) and I can't seem to get it to read in anything other than
the default, US English voice.

Any advice would be very much appreciated... many thanks.

[Mike West]

Hi Sam!

On Feb 29, 6:07 pm, Sam K <sam.kir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been having a look at the "chrome.tts" API recently and I've a
> query about available voices. From what I understand, to use anything
> other than the native voice you must install another voice as a
> separate extension (there are a few available in the Web Store at the
> moment).

Just to be clear, the TTS API first tries to use whatever voice your
operating system bundles. For Windows and Mac, this means you should
already be getting speech that correctly matches your installed
languages by default (see below where you ask specifically about
this). I've really only needed to install voices on Linux, where
things are less predictable by default...

> Currently, they all seem to be English - unless anyone
> happens to know of any voices available outside of the Web Store.

One goal of the accessibility team is to create a market for TTS
voices in the web store in the same way one has sprung up in the
Android market. The more compelling applications (like ChromeVox) in
the store, the more likely it is that more voices will show up.

> Having a glance at the Google Translate service, Google obviously have
> additional voices in additional languages but I am curious as to
> whether these voices (for different languages) will be made available
> as separate extensions or whether the API is limited to English at the
> minute?

I believe there are some licensing issues regarding Google
distributing additional voices, but I'll follow up internally.

To answer the specific question: no, the API is not intentionally
limited to English. It supports multiple languages.

> I may be completely missing something, but I've tried the demo app and
> my own extension (using various internationalised versions of Windows
> and Chrome) and I can't seem to get it to read in anything other than
> the default, US English voice.

Can you file a bug, please, via http://new.crbug.com/ with some
details? My understanding is that this should be working. If it's not,
we should fix it.

-Mike

[Sam K]

Hi Mike - many thanks for that info - very much appreciated. I figured
distribution/licensing was a factor in which voices were available
natively vs. within Google Translate.

Just to follow-up on the whole default voice thing (before I raise a
bug), here's a little more context. I have a Windows 7 machine. By
default (and it seems, regardless of my OS language/locale), Windows
ships only with Microsoft's "Anna" voice. However, I have installed
other third-party voices for different locales/languages which appear
in the "Voice Settings" box for Narrator. I have chosen one of these
as my default. In this situation, would I expect Chrome TTS to use my
Narrator selected voice, or does it look at things like locale/
language settings of voices in the Registry (at run time) to decide
which one to use?

Apologies if that is a naff question, but hopefully you'll get where
I'm coming from.

Thanks again...

--
Sam K

[Sam K]

Actually - scratch that last aspect altogether. No bug - Chrome TTS
speaks using the Speech default voice. I just had to find it first
(Control Panel -> Speech Recognition -> Text to Speech -> Voice
Selection)!!

Thanks for your advice again...

--
Sam K