speech synthesizer on chrome only play the first 200 characters

Question

I'm testing the native speech synthesizer in firefox, it works fine, only the pause () function fails, but in chrome, I have more errors, it only plays a short part of the text, only the first 200 characters, and it doesn't play everything else, I tried the library external meSpeak.js and if it plays everything but it takes a long time to load text of 1842 characters with which I did the test, I am using ubuntu system with chrome version 81.0.4044.92 url for testing https://mdn.github.io/web-speech-api/speak-easy-synthesis/ any solution for chrome ?? Thanks

Answer 1

I believe this is an issue with the speech synthesizer chosen. If you choose a local voice - one for which the audio can be generated simply by running in-browser / in-OS code on your local computer - then there should be no character limit, unless the voice you chose has such a limit, which doesn't seem likely

For example, on Windows, the two local voices I have are Microsoft David Desktop and Microsoft Zira Desktop. If I select these voices, the whole text gets played, regardless of length.

In contrast, other voices such as those from Google (eg Google US English) are not local; they may need to make a network request to parse the text into audio. Google's speech API seems to have a 200 character or so limit on how much text can be translated at once.

If the character limit is a problem, select a voice which is local, rather than one from Google.

Here's a snippet that'll list your available voices, as well as which are local or not:

const populateVoiceList = () => {
  console.log('Logging available voices');
  for (const voice of speechSynthesis.getVoices()) {
    console.log(voice.name, 'local: ' + voice.localService);
  }
};
populateVoiceList();
speechSynthesis.onvoiceschanged = populateVoiceList;