Text-to-speech woes · 8:52pm Apr 21st, 2021
I was talking about this in the Discord server earlier today, but no solution was had, so I figured I'd query the feed and see if anyone else has ideas. :B
As y'all might know, I utilize Fimfic's onboard TTS feature a lot, and it's gotten me through a ton of stories. I'm gearing up to do this again soon, in fact, so I need to get this squared away.
To my knowledge, Fimfic is supposed to default to whatever your system's TTS voice is. In my case, on Windows 10, that's Microsoft Dave. But since about yesterday, TTS has been this fast-paced female voice, and she's too squirrely to be of any use to me. D:
I've checked my local settings, they're still set to Microsoft Dave. Confoundingly, this other voice isn't even one of the choices I have. And I'm not the only one having this problem, c.f. aforementioned Discord conversation.
Anyone have ideas?
As an aside, I just got my second COVID shot so I may be out of commission for the next few days. XD
I can't help re: the TTS issue but yay for getting vaccinated!
TTL always makes me laugh when it hits pegasi, pronounced Peg-GAS-see
I just checked, and I got different voices on different browsers, masculine on Firefox and feminine on Safari. Doesn't look like it's your settings that are the problem.
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Like Emeril Pegasi, the celebrity chef?
FIMFic has TTS program?
I hate to say this, but have you tried restarted your computer? Sometimes that fixes bizarre bugs like this.
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Congrats on dose 2!!!
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Now that's unusual. <.< I use Chrome for everything, but I do know my desktop has always had a different voice because Windows 7.
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*cocks gun* Always has.
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Might not be a bad idea. I restart it once a week with regularity, but who knows.
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Excellent work.
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It does! Just click on a paragraph, and a little menu appears above it with an option to 🔊 Read.
It's incredibly useful for proofreading.
It uses whatever TTS is built into your browser or operating system.
Your browser's own internal TTS function will override your systemwide default one unless you tell it to stop it. I'm guessing whatever browser you use pushed out an update that reset that choice or something.
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The restart did not help. :B
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This seems a reasonable assumption. The question now is how to change this, because I attempted to look into it the other day with no luck. c.c
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derpicdn.net/img/view/2018/5/24/1740024.jpg
So I tried listening to the penultimate chapter of my story, and I gotta say. Hearing the bot reading lines written for a crazed Scotsman is an experience.
Safari on macOS uses the system voice, but seems a bit hurried when the FF read is used versus the browser’s version. Firefox’s pacing is the same and its voice is a briefly amusing robot-at-the-bottom-of-a-bottle voice.
A couple of years ago when I was playing around with special formatting for TTS, I had the same problem you are having, unfortunately I don’t recall the solution.
Instead of just restarting, see if you can clear caches in the browser. The TTS is likely some monstrously large set of Javascript files that may be mucked up because software is no longer deterministic. You’d want to clear out downloaded files or something, not cookies or history.
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...You know, I just went ahead and did that, but...
I'm on my desktop. >.<
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https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-use-windows-10s-narrator-to-read-your-screen-aloud
See if some of the speed/pitch nonsense if off there. Again, who the fark knows these days.
macOS ≠iOS (or not yet at least), plus Lord Knighty’s TTS plug-in is supposed to be OS/browser agnostic (laugh now) and it is marked “experimental” even after half a decade.
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...And then I did it on my laptop and forgot to test it. x.x Still no luck.
I guess I'm going to have to try Windows Narrator, which will mean A) highlighting entire chapters so it doesn't read the website, and B) turning caps lock off constantly. :/ Which sucks because the light doesn't work.
My current BKM is exporting fics from fimfiction as epubs and uploading them to Google Play Books. From there they'll sync automatically to the Play Books app on Android, which I can either read or listen to with TTS.
Don't think this works on iPhone though; last I checked the iPhone version didn't do TTS.
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Can you believe this blog has been up for four days and no one told me it says "Test"?
Had the same problem. I fixed it by logging into chrome as a guest. It gets annoying having to have two chromes open, but it works.
It took two days of messing around with updates, restarts, shutdown, different browsers, different devices, etc but in the end it was worth it. I simply did not want to bother training myself to get used to the new voice.
Oddly, I made a burner account for chrome to test it and it switch back to the feminine voice, so it's probably not the account itself that's causing the problem.
Either way, it'll be chrome's guest mode for me until it fixes itself. Or I might just be using chrome's guest mode indefinitly.
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Logging into Chrome as a guest sounds infinitely more agreeable than trying to use Narrator, which I cannot pause, which is finicky as hell, which is nearly impossible to get to do what you want. >.>
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Holy shit, this actually works! :O It's a pain in the ass, but so was Narrator. I'll take it!
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Oh hey! Fimfiction's been fixed!
i.imgur.com/EgsyXQM.png
They removed the TTS help button and replaced it with a setting button!
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orly <.<
Just in time for me to have finished reading both of those longfics, too. :|