Speaking Rate

[KPrerana4]

While running voiceOver tests using guidepup - we have observed that speaking rate is very low because of which our tests are taking too long. Could you please let us know if there is a way increase speaking rate in guidepup.

[cmorten]

Hi @KPrerana4 👋

Sorry for the slow reply. Afaik Guidepup currently configures VoiceOver (while it is being automated) to be set to the max speaking rate, see https://github.com/guidepup/guidepup/blob/main/src/macOS/VoiceOver/configureSettings.ts#L62 but open to suggestions!

One reason it can be quite slow is waiting for the full spoken text, if all you care about is the initial spoken text and not the "next page" of additional command information / description then you can use the capture option when using the start method to only capture initial text:

voiceOver.start({ capture: "initial" });

This is typically a fair bit faster.

In the meantime will have a look to see if there are any other options that could be used to speed it up - PRs welcome if have any ideas!

[jlp-craigmorten]

Ok, I've found that we can eliminate the delay between the main announcement and the subsequent hint speech which saves 400ms per interaction. See #65 raincheck on that as introduces some stability issues on capturing all the output, more work needed.

I've had a play whether different voices are faster etc. and if can abuse the speach rate to be over 100%, but there doesn't seem to be much can do here. There might be some extra ms savings if reduce verbosity, or start disabling things like punctuation verbosity, but think it is minimal unfortunately.