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

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also