Hi all. I’m a bit confused about what on my PC (or Mac, or phone, for that matter) is driving what voices are available to select for Read Aloud. On my Mac, for example, I went in to accessibility settings, went to spoken content, and added some better versions of some of the Spanish versions (“enhanced”, as they’re labeled). However, when I go to Readlang in Safari, those voices aren’t available - just the same few default ones that I originally saw.
I tried the same steps on my iPhone, and had the same result - new voices for XYZ language added, but those voices don’t appear in the system default browser.
My original understanding was that the Read Aloud voices were based on what the browser has available, but what the browser has available is largely driven by the base system settings. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
What am I missing? I’d really like to use the Read Aloud feature, but would really prefer to use these higher quality voices; the default ones are a bit too early 2000s, robotic text to speech for me.
It’s purely driven by what the browser makes available. Unfortunately on Apple devices this seems to only include some of the voices installed on your system.
One tip is to try Microsoft Edge browser which provides a good selection of its own high quality server-generated voices (at least on desktop, on iOS I think it’s stuck with the same selection of voices as the other browsers, probably due to Apple’s restrictions).
Sigh, leave it up to Apple to make weird decisions…
Thanks for the tip regarding Edge - just tested it and it does sound quite a bit better.
Last question: does Firefox simply not support the Read Aloud feature? It’s my go to browser and I’m not seeing the play button at all in Readlang. A quick google shows folks talking about TTS addons for Firefox and such. Weird that it doesn’t seem to have it out of the box.
On my macOS (Sonoma 14.7) machine Firefox (v138.0.4) does have Read Aloud available, at least in Spanish. Not sure why it’s not working in your case. Which operating system and Firefox version are you using?
