Using RHVoice Leticia Voice for TTS in Thorium Reader

[brenojac]

Hello dear RHVoice community,

We've been trying to setup the Leticia Voice for Brazillian Portuguese (https://louderpages.org/leticia) as a TTS option in Thorium Reader. Considering it is SAPI 5 compatible we were expecting to just get Leticia's voice listed as alternative voice.

However, this is not happening:

Here are the steps we've taken this far:

1. Downloaded and installed https://rhvoice.org/download/RHVoice-Brazilian-Portuguese-voice-Leticia-F123-v4.6.1021.18-setup.exe

2. Tried to list the new TTS voices in Thorium or Windows or even in the browser using https://jsbin.com/wuqumukesu/edit?js,console,output

3. Unfortunately in either case, Leticia voice does not show up as an alternative anywhere.

Further investigations have shown us that Windows TTS voices are stored at C:\Windows\Speech_OneCore\Engines\TTS, while RHVoice Leticia Voice are at C:\ProgramData\Olga Yakovleva\RHVoice\ and apparently in a different format. Not sure how to go from here.

Has anyone in the community gone through this problem? Suggestions / hints are welcome.

Thanks in advance

Breno

[zstanecic]

Hi @brenojac
How your reader interacts with sapi?
It needs to look up for registry, if it supports sapi protocol.
Have a good day,
Zvonimir

[brenojac]

Hello @zstanecic ,

Thanks for the reply. Actually, I'm not quite sure how Thorium interacts with SAPI. But it is able to list TTS voices available in Windows.

I'm investigating why it cant list RHvoice Letícia in Thorium Reader after being installled. Maybe someone may have had the experience before?

Breno

[zstanecic]

Hi again @brenojac,
I want to investigate this myself. Can you tell me, is Thorium accessible with screen readers?
If it is accessible, can you also tell me on which version you tried to reproduce the problem?

[brenojac]

Hello @zstanecic,

Thanks for the follow up. Yes, I have a team working on assessing interactive ebooks in terms of accessibility and asked them if NVDA works with Thorium Reader. They confirmed to me that it works.

However, Thorium Reader does have its own TTS system and works in tandem with EPUB's Media Overlay specs. So that the voice follows the text in real-time sync. Using NVDA, Leticia voice had the best results for us. When trying to use Leticia voice without NVDA, we got stuck. Thorium Reader is unable to find the voice, no matter what. I'm quite sure they are SAPI 5 compatible according to a number of threads we investigated. I kindly ask you to follow my post discussing with the Thorium team so that maybe we can find a solution together. It is at edrlab/thorium-reader#2095. There you can find references to the threads on issues adding new voices on Windows and not being listed at Thorium Reader.

Regarding the version, we're using Thorium latest version: 2.4.1 and can be downloaded at https://thorium.edrlab.org/ and Leticia voice link is hopefully the latest version as cited in the first message of this thread.

I'm sure we'll find a solution together. Thanks in advance!

Breno

[danielweck]

Hello all, thank you for investigating this. However note that Thorium does nothing "special" to discover synthetic speech voices available on the computer host, this is all handled by Chromium the web browser engine used by Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Android Webview, etc.
In other words, if the voice isn't detected by the standard JavaScript TTS Web API, then Thorium will not see it either. I recommend testing with Chromium first and if it all works fine then dig deeper in Thorium (with our help of course ;)

[HadrienGardeur]

This is what @danielweck means by JS TTS Web API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SpeechSynthesis/getVoices