Running chrome on adroid
Sorry about this. It could be a limitation with some combination of the voice, device and browser that you are using.
If anyone else is experiencing this issue, please reply to this thread.
Tried on my iPhone and I haven’t been able to get the read along to work at all with any of my browsers on iOS, unfortunately (FF, safari, and chrome) No play button is appearing
I really like the feature so if anyone has any tips to get it working, they’d be very much appreciated
Which language are you learning? It could unfortunately be that iOS isn’t making any voices available to webapps for your language.
Spanish. I tried Edge on my iPhone and got it sort of working in browser via the “read along” button. The voices are really excellent, much better than what I have with chrome on my galaxy tab s9. Unfortunately no voices are coming up for me with Edge on android. (tried the beta, dev, and canary builds with the same result)
I’ve done some testing myself and here’s what I’ve found:
On iOS
I’ve tested it for Spanish on iOS (version 17.6.1) in the following browsers:
- Safari
- Chrome
- Edge
- As a full screen PWA
And in all of these I have the following two voices available:
- Monica (es-ES)
- Paulina (es-MX)
If these don’t appear, you could try checking here to see if they are downloaded to your device and to download them if necessary: iOS Settings App → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices → Spanish. Unfortunately however, installing more voices here doesn’t seem to make them available to webapps like Readlang, but perhaps if you don’t even have those two voices I listed above then installing them might make a difference.
On Android
I only have one working Android device at the moment, which is an entry level RedMi phone running Android version 9 PPR1.180610.001.
On Chrome, initially I had no voices available in Spanish, but then I managed to install them at: Settings → Accessibility → Text-to-speech output → Preferred engine (make sure it’s set to Google Text-to-speech) → cog icon → Install voice data → Download your desired Spanish voice
Readlang’s read-aloud feature then worked, but doesn’t sync to the text. Just as you first reported. It’s likely that the relevant part of the web speech api on Android Chrome isn’t fully implemented. This bug report seems to confirm this: Chromium
On Edge - same result as you, no voices available
Im on the iOS 18.1 beta, so that might be the cause. Tried to get the Microsoft edge voices on android using tts server (GitHub - jing332/tts-server-android: 这是一个Android系统TTS应用,内置微软演示接口,可自定义HTTP请求,可导入其他本地TTS引擎,以及根据中文双引号的简单旁白/对话识别朗读 ,还有自动重试,备用配置,文本替换等更多功能。) but unfortunately changing engines in the accessibility settings doesn’t seem to have any affect on which voices I get.
Can’t emphasize enough how excellent the azure engine voices are. It’s like turning all content into an audiobook
Good news!
Your post led me on an investigation which has led to Readlang now supporting these great Azure voices in the Read Aloud feature when used in Edge browser. See here: Read-Aloud now supports higher quality server generated voices!
Thats awesome! I just saw that post (and replied with my new issue on android )
I really think the azure voices are a game changer for language acquisition. I have LingQ, which led me to readlang bc I hate their UI, and going through an epub of El Principito with the azure voice on readlang is honestly on par with the audiobook included in LingQ.
Your platform absolutely destroys Lingq in every area except their included native audio and mobile support