Skip to main content

Chrome Gets Text-to-Speech Capability in Multiple Languages

Google Chrome now includes a Text-to-Speech (TTS) API that's simple to use, powerful, and flexible for users, revealed Dominic Mazzoni, Software Engineer. The TTS API enables developers to implement a speech engine in an extension for Chrome. Already a couple of extensions are available for download from Chrome Web Store that utilizes the TTS API. Among them SpeakIt is an interesting one.

The SpeakIt extension allows Chrome users to select text on a webpage and convert it to speech. The extension uses the Google Network TTS (Text-to-Speech) with language auto-detection, enabling it to read aloud all languages that are supported by Google, with the ability to expand Chrome’s speech capabilities by adding new TTS engines.

speakit-chrome

To read aloud text on a page, first select the text you want it to read and then click the SpeakIt icon. When it is ready to read, the number of sentences is shown on the icon and the selected text will be read aloud. To stop listening at any time click pause.

SpeakIt can be configured to use either the default SpeakIt voice or the Native voice engine of your operating system. The voice is crisp and very human like. A couple of additional voices are also available. You can adjust the default volume, and some voices also let you adjust pitch and speaking rate (words per minute).

speakit-options

On the TTS API, Dominic Mazzoni explains, “These voices both use Native Client to synthesize speech. The experience is very easy for end users: just click and install one of those voices, and immediately any talking app or extension has the ability to speak using that voice.

If a user doesn't have any voices installed, Chrome automatically speaks using the native speech capabilities of your Windows or Mac operating system, if possible. Chrome OS comes with a built-in speech engine, too. For now, there's unfortunately no default voice support on Linux – but TTS is fully supported once users first install a voice from the Chrome Web Store.”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.

Diagram 101: Different Types of Diagrams and When To Use Them

Diagrams are a great way to visualize information and convey meaning. The problem is that there’s too many different types of diagrams, so it can be hard to know which ones you should use in any given situation. To help you out, we’ve created this diagram that lays out the 7 most common types of diagrams and when they’re best used: