Read aloud function is just not working at all, play button is not there.
Had the button once but that’s it. Also, when it did actually work, the TTS was awful - I’m learning German and it read it as English.
Learning from an IPad, tried everything to fix with no success:(
Sorry about this. When I added this feature there were some decent quality voices available on iOS, and I figured that over time Apple would add more and/or improve them. But with the last two iOS updates it seems that support for the Web Speech API (what Readlang uses to play the speech) has got worse 
. With iOS 18 there are no decent quality voices available in Spanish (and probably other languages too). Sorry about this. Hopefully either Apple will fix this and/or I’ll come up with another solution in future (e.g. native iOS app or server generated voices)
The best browser right now for Read Aloud is MS Edge on desktop which has some wonderful Azure-powered voices available.
(If you happen to have mp3 audio files or know how to use a TTS service to generate them you could try out the new mp3 upload feature: NEW mp3 audio upload with auto-transcription!)
1 Like
I want to add another thing I have noticed for Android
in Chrome apk (whether in mobile mode or desktop view mode) i can see the read aloud button. But if i install it as a Web App, the button only shows up in Desktop view mode.
And in Edge i can’t see the button in either mobile mode or deskop view. (Edge in general have some other issues, but they are annoying at best. Not blockers)
and why cant we have audio in french texts too?
Read Aloud works for any language for which a voice is available in your specific browser and device. If it isn’t available for French, maybe try a different device and/or browser (note that on iOS, switching browser probably won’t help since they are all forced to use the same underlying browser engine).
The best browser for the Read Aloud feature in my testing is Edge on desktop which has very high quality voices available for a lot of languages (tested on macOS but I’m sure Windows will be just as good).
I’m not sure what explains the difference here. It could be a quirk of the particular browser/device you are using. That said, I’ve made one change[1] to make Readlang a little more resilient when it comes to using TTS in different browsers/devices. To be honest, I’m not sure this is going to help in your case, but you might want to try again just in case it works now.
[1] Technical details for those interested: It used to be that Readlang would load the TTS voices before rendering the reader page, and to avoid disruption in the case where the browser was taking too long to respond (or just never responding which would happen in some cases) it would give up after 1s of waiting and just go ahead and render the reader page without the Read Aloud button. In my testing 1s was more than enough to know whether the voices were going to be loaded or not, but it could be that on slower devices then more time is needed. Now, the reader page will first render without the Read Aloud button, and then it will attempt to load the list of TTS voices, and will wait up to 10s to do this, and if needed it will display the button once the list of voices is loaded.
It seems that on iOS 18.1.1 there are decent TTS voices available again, at least in Spanish, French, and probably other languages too. They aren’t as good as the ones available in desktop Edge browser, but they are OK.
Seems to work OK on Firefox for iOS. This is my first time using it. I wish the monolingual definitions would read aloud also when I click a word mid-session.