You can do the same thing with Firefox' Reader Mode. On Linux you have to set up speech-dispatcher to use your favorite TTS as a backend.Once it is set up, there will be an option to listen the page.
Firefox should integrate that in their Reader Mode (the default System Voices are often very un-listable). Would seems like an easy win, and it's a non-AI feature so not polarising.
Not sure about macOS or Windows, but on Linux Firefox uses speech-dispatcher, which is a server, and Firefox is the client. Speech-dispatcher then delegates the text to the correct TTS backend. It basically runs a shell command, either sending the text to a TTS HTTP server using curl, or piping it to the standard input of a TTS binary.
Speech-dispatcher commonly uses espeak-ng, which sounds robotic but is reportedly better for visually impaired users, because at higher speeds it is still intelligible. This allows visually impaired users to hear UI labels more quickly. For non visually impaired users, we generally want natural sounding voices and to use TTS in the same way we would listen to podcasts or a bedtime story.
With this system, users are in full control and can swap TTS models easily. If a model is shipped and, two weeks later, a smaller, newer, or better one appears, their work would become obsolete very quickly.
Hi I'm Lukas and I like to build re-build software to learn how it works and why it was made that way. I write a lot of go and recently lua as well. I'm currently studying Computer Science at Oregon State University and am also currently the president of ACM@OSU.Looking for internships and full time positions.
https://github.com/lukasmwerner/pocket-reader