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Did Firefox reader mode on Linux loose its TTS feature or was it never present on Linux? It was quite useful feature on macOS but I miss it on Linux now. I gues

Did Firefox reader mode on Linux loose its TTS feature or was it never present on Linux? It was quite useful feature on macOS but I miss it on Linux now. I guess it has something to do with Pocket.

tux1968 6y ago
Reader mode is available (at least on FF version 85). There is a headphone icon appears on the upper left of the page and allows you to set the reading speed and choose from a bunch of different voices.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  On Linux? I'm on FF 85 as well and all I see is the Font & Pocket button on the left panel in reader more and the headphone which was available on macOS is missing.
  - tux1968 6y ago
    Yes, working here on Linux. Maybe go into about:config and look for "narrate" options, perhaps your "narrate.enable" is set to false?
    - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
      narrate.enable is true, only narrate.test was false and making it true didn't help. I'll try digging deeper, thanks.
hojjat12000 6y ago
Mine has it. I'm guessing it is checking for a library and if it exists then it shows the icon because it showed up after a few seconds. There are about a 100 different voices that I can choose from and they all suck. A few months ago we trained a pretty nice DNN TTS engine and I wish I had the permission to release as a free software for Linux. I feel Linux has been in need of a good TTS forever.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  I think you're correct, it seems speech-dispatcher was made an optional dependency for firefox build and that Arch requires 'festival-freebsoft-utils'[1] along with 'speech-dispatcher' for narrator but the former hasn't been updated in a long time. Not sure whether that's the reason, but narrator doesn't work even after installing those packages although the speech-dispatcher gets triggered in the firewall when the reader mode is accessed. Interestingly, this is a closed bug in Arch. Guess it's time to reopen it. [1]https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/festival-freebsoft-utils/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/festival-freebsoft-utils/ [2]https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/50886 https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/50886

Did Firefox reader mode on Linux loose its TTS feature or was it never present on Linux? It was quite useful feature on macOS but I miss it on Linux now. I guess it has something to do with Pocket.

tux1968 6y ago

Reader mode is available (at least on FF version 85). There is a headphone icon appears on the upper left of the page and allows you to set the reading speed and choose from a bunch of different voices.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
On Linux? I'm on FF 85 as well and all I see is the Font & Pocket button on the left panel in reader more and the headphone which was available on macOS is missing.
- tux1968 6y ago
  Yes, working here on Linux. Maybe go into about:config and look for "narrate" options, perhaps your "narrate.enable" is set to false?
  - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
    narrate.enable is true, only narrate.test was false and making it true didn't help. I'll try digging deeper, thanks.

hojjat12000 6y ago

Mine has it. I'm guessing it is checking for a library and if it exists then it shows the icon because it showed up after a few seconds. There are about a 100 different voices that I can choose from and they all suck. A few months ago we trained a pretty nice DNN TTS engine and I wish I had the permission to release as a free software for Linux. I feel Linux has been in need of a good TTS forever.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
I think you're correct, it seems speech-dispatcher was made an optional dependency for firefox build and that Arch requires 'festival-freebsoft-utils'[1] along with 'speech-dispatcher' for narrator but the former hasn't been updated in a long time. Not sure whether that's the reason, but narrator doesn't work even after installing those packages although the speech-dispatcher gets triggered in the firewall when the reader mode is accessed. Interestingly, this is a closed bug in Arch. Guess it's time to reopen it. [1]https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/festival-freebsoft-utils/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/festival-freebsoft-utils/ [2]https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/50886 https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/50886