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A comment on Show HN: ReadToMyShoe – An offline-first web app for listening to your articles.

Re:Show HN: ReadToMyShoe – An offline-first web app for list... by frontrowseat on Monday September 12, 2022 @09:23AM (#32809806)
> Notice: This is a demo server. Text to speech is expensive. You will be able to add new articles until I have spent $300. This server will be up for about a week.

If this is offline first, then why use a server at all? Why not use the native OS text-to-speech? MacOS has built in text-to-speech and so does Windows (Narrarator?)

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Re:Show HN: ReadToMyShoe – An offline-first web app for list... by doomrobo on Monday September 12, 2022 @09:30AM (#32809915)
Good question. The short answer is that the UX of doing it with local TTS is pretty terrible. The voices will of course vary from device to device. But more importantly, control from the lockscreen doesn't work anymore (I've found you can't really use the web TTS API in a way that plays well with the MediaSession API, the position-resuming functionality, etc)
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Re:Show HN: ReadToMyShoe – An offline-first web app for list... by selfhoster11 on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @06:49AM (#32835389)
Browser TTS on Linux is really terrible, for one
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Re:Show HN: ReadToMyShoe – An offline-first web app for list... by mbreese on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @07:36AM (#32835745)
What about Android?

We're really talking about iOS and Android here, if I grok the use-case.

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Re:Show HN: ReadToMyShoe – An offline-first web app for list... by doomrobo on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @09:47AM (#32837123)
Try it out here https://mdn.github.io/dom-examples/web-speech-api/speak-easy...

It's god awful on iOS

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Re:Show HN: ReadToMyShoe – An offline-first web app for list... by obviyus on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @11:59AM (#32839043)
Some of those are nightmare inducing.
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Re:Show HN: ReadToMyShoe – An offline-first web app for list... by selfhoster11 on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @10:29PM (#32846279)
Android is not really Linux here. It normally includes the proprietary TTS engine from Google, which is quite decent. Even offline, it’s many times better than what Firefox on Linux comes with.
[ Parent | on HN ]