SpeechSynthesisVoice

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since September 2018.

The SpeechSynthesisVoice interface of the Web Speech API represents a voice that the system supports. Every SpeechSynthesisVoice has its own relative speech service including information about language, name and URI.

Instance properties

SpeechSynthesisVoice.default Read only

A boolean value indicating whether the voice is the default voice for the current app language (true), or not (false.)

SpeechSynthesisVoice.lang Read only

Returns a BCP 47 language tag indicating the language of the voice.

SpeechSynthesisVoice.localService Read only

A boolean value indicating whether the voice is supplied by a local speech synthesizer service (true), or a remote speech synthesizer service (false.)

SpeechSynthesisVoice.name Read only

Returns a human-readable name that represents the voice.

SpeechSynthesisVoice.voiceURI Read only

Returns the type of URI and location of the speech synthesis service for this voice.

Examples

The following snippet is excerpted from our Speech synthesizer demo.

js
const synth = window.speechSynthesis;
function populateVoiceList() {
  voices = synth.getVoices();

  for (let i = 0; i < voices.length; i++) {
    const option = document.createElement("option");
    option.textContent = `${voices[i].name} (${voices[i].lang})`;

    if (voices[i].default) {
      option.textContent += " — DEFAULT";
    }

    option.setAttribute("data-lang", voices[i].lang);
    option.setAttribute("data-name", voices[i].name);
    voiceSelect.appendChild(option);
  }
}

populateVoiceList();
if (speechSynthesis.onvoiceschanged !== undefined) {
  speechSynthesis.onvoiceschanged = populateVoiceList;
}

inputForm.onsubmit = (event) => {
  event.preventDefault();

  const utterThis = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance(inputTxt.value);
  const selectedOption =
    voiceSelect.selectedOptions[0].getAttribute("data-name");
  for (let i = 0; i < voices.length; i++) {
    if (voices[i].name === selectedOption) {
      utterThis.voice = voices[i];
    }
  }
  utterThis.pitch = pitch.value;
  utterThis.rate = rate.value;
  synth.speak(utterThis);

  utterThis.onpause = (event) => {
    const char = event.utterance.text.charAt(event.charIndex);
    console.log(
      `Speech paused at character ${event.charIndex} of "${event.utterance.text}", which is "${char}".`,
    );
  };

  inputTxt.blur();
};

Specifications

Specification
Web Speech API
# speechsynthesisvoice

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also