RFC: Speech Dispatcher output module using a web browser's TTS capabilities

[Alain Kalker]

Hi list,

I'm a bit surprised to have found so little information about this, but 
I think it may be very interesting to try and use a web browser as a 
speech synthesizer.

More and more browsers support HTML5, and one of HTML5's interesting 
features is its (optional) support for text-to-speech.
The Google Chrome (and Chromium) browsers in particular have some very 
nice sounding voices, installable as extensions from the Chrome web 
store, search for: "Text-to-speech by Google".

Testing whether your browser supports speech output is very easy: visit 
the page below and click on the "Speak" buttons.

Demo of web speech API Text to Speech / Speech Synthesis function : 
http://html5-examples.craic.com/google_chrome_text_to_speech.html

As far as I can tell, there is no need for any special permissions to be 
set in the browser settings, nor do there appear to be any legal issues 
involved in accessing the text-to-speech functions, they are all 
controlled by simple JavaScript, locally installed voices require no 
active Internet connection, and no license keys, API keys or whatever 
are needed.

Getting this to work with Speech Dispatcher involves writing an output 
module, which in turn will need to communicate with the browser.
I have a little experience with Node.js, so that would be my first 
choice for implementing this.

Any comments, suggestions, or pointers to existing projects are welcome :-)

Kind regards,

Alain Kalker