TTS behaves oddly in MacOS 15

[mreichhoff]

The voice is quite fast and robotic, and word highlighting is broken.

The behavior is seen in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox on an (at minimum) an intel Mac.

[mreichhoff]

not just intel macs!

The voice with name Tingting sounds mostly fine, while the other 8 (!) choices sound awful. It appears simply not setting a voice (instead setting only the utterance's lang and text properties) causes Tingting to be selected on macOS, but will need to verify empty-voice utterances are supported across platforms, or put in OS-specific logic to pick the correct voice

[alfons]

I've researched a few hours into this and Tingting is the way to go (as of Dec 2024). Reasoning: The only other alternative is to pay for API access for high quality speech synthesis websites, and to either generate the audio on the fly (with async fetch, which most of times proofed to be too slow, especially for flashcards) or to download completely rendered audio and store it with the repository (which is unreasonable given the large amount of examples and combinations.)

[mreichhoff]

Agreed for now.

I do want to integrate audio files (IIRC Tatoeba has a fair amount, and a bunch of shared anki decks link to voice recordings), plus AI TTS, and possibly the Forvo API at some point, but that's not a today problem.

Hacking in use of Tingting when available in #50. I could go further with OS detection or something, but I'm accepting the risk some other platform has a Tingting voice I wouldn't want.