2058219 - Reader mode narrate on macOS uses a robot voice as the default voice

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Web Speech, defect)

Description

[:Gijs (he/him)]

See summary.

Currently suspect this is a regression caused by a macOS change, but waiting for confirmation on that.

Comment 1

[Eitan Isaacson [:eeejay]]

Any voice I select in https://eeejay.github.io/webspeechdemos/ sounds funny. I think this is a broader issuer than our reader mode and is related to our web speech api.

Comment 2

[Eitan Isaacson [:eeejay]]

Attachment: Bug 2058219 - Port OSX speech synth to AVSpeechSynthesizer. r?#media-playback-reviewers

NSSpeechSynthesizer stopped providing us with default voices at some point.
This caused us to use "novelty" voices by default.
I took the opportunity to filter out novelty voices entirely,
as well as Eloquence voices that don't seem to work.

Comment 3

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:padenot, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 4

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/58f4b6a9c129
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/09c8aca4673b
Port OSX speech synth to AVSpeechSynthesizer. r=media-playback-reviewers,padenot

Comment 5

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/09c8aca4673b

Comment 6

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

Did you want to nominate this for the Fx155 relnotes? If so, set the relnote-firefox flag to "?"
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Release_Notes_Nomination

Possible wording:

Improved Reader Mode narration on macOS, which now uses the system's modern voices instead of the older robotic default.

Comment 7

[Eitan Isaacson [:eeejay]]

This should not be a user visible change as much as we now use a different API that hopefully mitigates this bug.

The wording is also misleading. We always had access to the nin robotic voices