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ackalker

Member

Registered: 2012-11-27

Posts: 201

Use Chromium OS text-to-speech voices with Chromium browser

...and he's at it again!

TL;DR chromium-ext-chromiumos-tts-git - all TTS voices from Chromium OS for use with Chromium desktop browser. Install as unpacked extension (no more auto-install, sorry, damn you Google!)

Included voices:

• Deutsch

• UK English

• Indian English

• US English

• Español

• Español de Estados Unidos

• Français

• Bahasa Indonesia

• हिन्दी

• Italiano

• 한국의

• Nederlands

• Português do Brasil

So you've heard about the text-to-speech capabilities of Chromium OS, and you would like to use them with your desktop browser?
Perhaps you have dyslexia, a visual disability, or just a desire to learn a new language, have Web pages read out to you, or you simply want to show off your digital-fu to your friends?

Then you may have noticed that the Chrome web store does have plenty speech synthesizers from third parties, but in most countries, the one from Google usually shows up with just one voice (US English).

For those who don't (want to) speak English, are bi-/multilingual, or who just are more open-minded with regards to the world's languages, here's my way to help make this happen: chromium-ext-chromiumos-tts-git on the AUR.

This extension packages the TTS engine and all the voices available from the Chromium OS project...as a Chromium extension.

To install it:

• Download the taurball, build and install the package

• In Chromium, browse to chrome://extensions

• Enable Developer mode by ticking the box

• Click the button named "Install unpacked extension..."

• Navigate to /usr/share/chromium/extensions/chromium-ext-chromiumos-tts

• Click on Open

That's it, you should now have a new extension named "Chromium OS Text-to-speech (by Google)" enabled and ready to use.

Note: Before rushing off to try out some HTML5 / TTS demos out there on the Web, please realize that not all of them work well (or at all), since text-to-speech on the Web is quite new and still in development.
The easiest way to get a quick glimpse (or rather soundbite) of what this thing can do, is to install the ChromeVox extension from the Google web store. After installation, click on its Options link, scroll down to Voices, and try out the different languages from the listbox.

Suggestions, questions, etc. are very welcome.

Enjoy :-)

Last edited by ackalker (2016-05-04 14:34:56)

ackalker

Member

Registered: 2012-11-27

Posts: 201

Re: Use Chromium OS text-to-speech voices with Chromium browser

To make it clear, this is not ripped, reverse-engineered, "warez" or anything like that. It uses publicly available material from the Chromium OS project, and modifies only BSD-licensed source files.

jbalint

Member

Registered: 2016-04-21

Posts: 1

Re: Use Chromium OS text-to-speech voices with Chromium browser

awesome. thanks a lot!

ackalker

Member

Registered: 2012-11-27

Posts: 201

Re: Use Chromium OS text-to-speech voices with Chromium browser

@jbalint You're welcome

P.S. I've added a list of supported voices to the first comment. Enjoy