Nice wrapper. That said, the standard Web Speech API really is pretty straightforward if you want to play with the raw API.
I'm surprised Firefox doesn't support any part of the API. Granted, it's a Google-pushed spec, but they seem to have been working together on the now-defunct Text-to-Speech API. Plus, the speech synthesis aspect is merely handled by the OS (unlike the recognition aspect which is probably handled by Google for most users). I don't really follow web spec stuff though, so I'm pretty out of the loop.
I loaded the webpage then unplugged from the Internet and tried to play the demos. The speech synthesis was actually done over the Internet by default, and fell back to native platform only when offline, it seemed.
The speech recognition did not work offline at all, though we know it should be eventually possible thanks to Android's offline dictation download (iirc?).
Speech recognition is nice, but all of this is going through Google's servers. Besides not working offline, do we really want Google listening in on every thing on the Internet?
Hey, you're that guy who always warns us about Google like we're all idiots.
If it's optional I don't see the problem. Some people are not capable using a keyboard and a mouse, for example. Let's not let our paranoia ruin it for them.
Others of us would simply like to kick back and surf the web without reaching for the keyboard or mouse.
As for not working offline, I usually prefer to be online when I'm surfing the web anyway.
No, it's just the standard comment made on HN. It probably doesn't represent the population in general and it doesn't add anything to the conversation.
I was playing around with it and it's fairly unstable, playing a blank message ex: "", seemed to crash the engine, and playing large pieces of text also seemed to crash it, the only thing that resolved the issue was restarting chrome.
Same here. It should work theoretically though. Chromium on linux is supposed to have speech synthesis support via festival. I have festival installed, and speech-dispatcher, and just checked chrome://flags but no luck. :-/
The voices come from your OS' voice services, so it depends on what your OS ships with. That said, both Mac and Windows have been quietly improving their speech synthesis over the years.
I'm surprised Firefox doesn't support any part of the API. Granted, it's a Google-pushed spec, but they seem to have been working together on the now-defunct Text-to-Speech API. Plus, the speech synthesis aspect is merely handled by the OS (unlike the recognition aspect which is probably handled by Google for most users). I don't really follow web spec stuff though, so I'm pretty out of the loop.