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.

js
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

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
speechSynthesis

Legend

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Full support
Full support
No support
No support
See implementation notes.

See also