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Comment by mkroman

2 days ago

Ah yeah, there's this: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

I can't seem to find anything that mentions a Firefox integration though?

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mkroman

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capitainenemo  2 days ago

Click Reader mode on a web page, then the read aloud option in the sidebar.

Note that how well it works on Linux will depend on your distro and default settings, as is common for Linux world. They do try to provide setup instructions if your linux distro has issues.

... now whether that model is integrated by default, no idea. I imagine that depends on size.

Oh, and mozilla's off-line translate for private translation of web pages... that's another neat AI thing they added that I've found super helpful. Chrome still requires sending the content to their servers.

  • mkroman  2 days ago

    Ah cool, thanks, didn't know this existed. I just get a dummy message when playing audio, so I'll play around with some speech dispatcher[1] solutions later!

    > Oh, and mozilla's off-line translate for private translation of web pages... that's another neat AI thing they added that I've found super helpful.

    Yes, it's awesome! And one of my favorite additions to Firefox in many years, it's stuff like that they should focus on if they want AI, imo.

    [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Speech_dispatcher

  • _flux  1 day ago

    I tried it, and I'm sure it's not a based on any language model. Sounds like espeak-ng or its ilk, so it probably uses whatever's available?

    The TTS repo was updated 5 years ago and links to installation instructions for Ubuntu are broken :/. Also the docker repo is archived, but only recently, so maybe it works.

    All in all, doesn't look like the project is alive at all.

    • capitainenemo  21 hours ago

      It definitely uses whatever is available, but on review of the models (and there are quite a few) the ones I checked included instructions for integrating into linux speech engines.

      What your distro uses by default might be espeak-ng, but you could use mozilla TTS or festival or piper or anything else. It makes sense to not bundle an entire system that repeats things that are available on all desktop environments and mobile these days, but instead call out to those from the browser functionality - especially given the enormous size of high quality speech models - not to mention the localisation issue. I think the TTS project was just to increase availability of high quality FOSS alternatives. Getting those into your distro is more of a distro packager thing.