SpeechSynthesis: speaking 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 speaking read-only property of the SpeechSynthesis interface is a boolean value that returns true if an utterance is currently in the process of being spoken — even if SpeechSynthesis is in a paused state.

Value

A boolean value.

Examples

js
const synth = window.speechSynthesis;

const utterance1 = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance(
  "How about we say this now? This is quite a long sentence to say.",
);
const utterance2 = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance(
  "We should say another sentence too, just to be on the safe side.",
);

synth.speak(utterance1);
synth.speak(utterance2);

const amISpeaking = synth.speaking; // will return true if utterance 1 or utterance 2 are currently being spoken

Specifications

Specification
Web Speech API
# dom-speechsynthesis-speaking

Browser compatibility

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobile
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
speaking

Legend

Tip: you can click/tap on a cell for more information.

Full support
Full support
No support
No support

See also