Exploring the Web Speech API

When a website is fully loaded, the speechSynthesis API will fetch all available voices asynchronously. Once done, it will fire a voiceschanged event letting us know that everything is ready to go. Utterances added to the queue before this event is fired will still work. They will, however, use the browser’s default voice with its default settings.

The getVoices() method will return every loaded voice. This list contains both native voices and browser-specific ones. Not every browser provides custom voice services, both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge do. Generally speaking, these voices sound much better, but you are sacrificing privacy for quality. They also require an internet connection.

Warning: While using Google Chrome’s custom voice service, each utterance instance has a character limit of 200-300. If the utterance’s text changes, the limit is reset. It is unknown whether this is a limitation or a bug.

The function above sets up our SpeechSynthesisUtterance instance once the voiceschanged event is fired. Using the Array.find() method I select my voice of choice, gracefully falling back to the browser’s default.

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