[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Best free text-to-speech plugins for browsers?
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Ask HN: Best free text-to-speech plugins for browsers?
Considering the recent advances in DL methods, is there a good
(natural) TTS technology available as Firefox plugin? I currently
use "Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader" but the free
version's voice is a bit robotic. Can OpenAI Whisper be used as a
plugin? [edit]: An offline method generating audio for an input
text is also fine (non-realtime TTS)
Author : ducktective
Score : 31 points
Date : 2022-10-11 14:26 UTC (8 hours ago)
| malshe wrote:
| > Can OpenAI Whisper be used as a plugin?
|
| I believe Whisper is speech to text only
| westcort wrote:
| This snippet of code will use whatever your browser uses for TTS:
| https://www.locserendipity.com/TTS.html
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think A.I. voices will always seem robotic for some
| applications. I have been thinking about projecting Unreal
| Framework characters into a mirror like
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper%27s_ghost
|
| and think even a generic character with low-end motion capture
| and some out-of-the box motion animations should be "good enough"
| but I'd still need a voice actor to get acceptable vocals.
|
| The trouble I see there isn't just that the default voice is
| "robotic" but that a real voice actor can take direction. You'd
| hope a voice actor has a good intuition for how to make a
| character come alive but you can always ask for adjustments. For
| current A.I. voices you can at best talk to the hand.
|
| Reading text on a page is less demanding, but the system still
| has to adjust the tone of voice, prosody and such to match the
| emotional tone of the content. Maybe this can be done without
| emotion or a simulation of emotion on an end-to-end basis, but it
| has to be done.
| karaterobot wrote:
| You probably already know about the Web Speech API and have
| decided it's not natural sounding enough? Just checking.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_...
| freediver wrote:
| If you use a Mac, browsers using WebKit natively (Safari,
| Orion...) will have system text to speech built in, no extension
| needed. It is decent and definetely usable.
| freewizard wrote:
| AFAIK that works for others browsers on Mac too, Firefox and
| Brave both use same macOS API under the hood.
| [deleted]
| butz wrote:
| Do you want to run speech synthesis on remote server (all
| visitors are getting same experience), or your own computer (Web
| Speech API)?
| ducktective wrote:
| my own computer, as a consumer.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| From what I understand working with web accessibility, the
| majority of visually impared users of screen readers use either
| JAWS[1] on Windows (there's also Narrator built-in to Windows) or
| VoiceOver[2] on Mac. These are going to be more robust than a
| browser plugin.
|
| [1] https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/
|
| [2] https://www.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/_1121.html
| guerby wrote:
| Related question: is there software that ask you to read a few
| pages of text and then is able to do text to speech with result
| close to your voice?
|
| Note: text is choosen by the software to cover most sounds in the
| given language.
| abrichr wrote:
| https://www.descript.com/overdub
|
| > Descript's Overdub lets you create a text-to-speech model of
| your voice or select one from our ultra-realistic stock voices.
| Triangle9349 wrote:
| Many browser extensions use azure, google and amazon paid TTS
| APIs for the best quality. I really like Azure English (Canada)
| voice and it's free from Edge read aloud. My main browser is
| chrome, have to use a small ahk script: Get corrent url, open
| edge small window in reader mode
| (--app=read://https://"%chromeURL% "--new-window") and press read
| aloud hotkey. In general, Edge has become more and more
| attractive lately.
| radicalriddler wrote:
| Huh.. this is actually something I'm working on at the moment.
| The value is being able to asynchronously listen to audio of an
| article while keeping going with your work.
|
| At the moment I'm relying on AWS primarily, it's got a couple
| good neural voices that I enjoy listening to, and then sync it up
| with S3 and a possible SNS (simple notification service). Glad to
| see someone else has seen a need for it, but I've also been
| thinking of how to do it agnostic of AWS.
|
| It's possible at the moment for me to go into reader view, copy
| and paste the content into AWS polly interface, paste the bucket
| name, paste the SNS ARN, and then wait for it to finish, find it
| in the bucket and then open it.
|
| I want that all in 3 steps, Start the Conversion, Find it easier
| in a better user interface, Hit Play.
|
| And then from there, start implementing an SSML builder to modify
| the speed and prose of different paragraphs and stuff, but that's
| super far down the line.
| ppjim wrote:
| Natural reader paid version
|
| https://www.naturalreaders.com/
|
| Google TTS
|
| https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/
|
| So far, the bests TTS tools I have found.
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(page generated 2022-10-11 23:02 UTC)