Window: speechSynthesis property
Baseline Widely available
This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since September 2018.
The speechSynthesis
read-only property of the Window object returns a SpeechSynthesis
object, which is the entry point into using Web Speech API speech synthesis functionality.
Value
A SpeechSynthesis
object.
Examples
In our basic Speech synthesizer demo, we first grab a reference to the SpeechSynthesis controller using window.speechSynthesis
.
After defining some necessary variables, we retrieve a list of the voices available using SpeechSynthesis.getVoices()
and populate a select menu with them so the user can choose what voice they want.
Inside the inputForm.onsubmit
handler, we stop the form submitting with preventDefault(), create a new SpeechSynthesisUtterance
instance containing the text from the text <input>
, set the utterance's voice to the voice selected in the <select>
element, and start the utterance speaking via the SpeechSynthesis.speak()
method.
const synth = window.speechSynthesis;
const inputForm = document.querySelector("form");
const inputTxt = document.querySelector("input");
const voiceSelect = document.querySelector("select");
function populateVoiceList() {
voices = synth.getVoices();
for (const voice of voices) {
const option = document.createElement("option");
option.textContent = `${voice.name} (${voice.lang})`;
if (voice.default) {
option.textContent += " — DEFAULT";
}
option.setAttribute("data-lang", voice.lang);
option.setAttribute("data-name", voice.name);
voiceSelect.appendChild(option);
}
}
populateVoiceList();
if (speechSynthesis.onvoiceschanged !== undefined) {
speechSynthesis.onvoiceschanged = populateVoiceList;
}
inputForm.onsubmit = (event) => {
event.preventDefault();
const utterThis = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance(inputTxt.value);
const selectedOption =
voiceSelect.selectedOptions[0].getAttribute("data-name");
utterThis.voice = voices.find((v) => v.name === selectedOption);
synth.speak(utterThis);
inputTxt.blur();
};
Specifications
Specification |
---|
Web Speech API # tts-section |
Browser compatibility
BCD tables only load in the browser