web speech api speech synthesis - getting voice list

Question

I'm having a weird issue with the web speech api. I've set up some code to speak a string of text - very rarely, it speaks it in a normal voice ("Alex" from Dictation and Speech Settings in Mac OS X). But usually, it speaks in the voice "Albert".

I'm looking at the w3c web speech api listed here:

https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/speech-api/raw-file/tip/speechapi.html#dfn-ttsgetvoices

and there is an interface called

SpeechSynthesisVoiceList {}

I am trying to access this functionality, but I can't.

How would I access this voice list? I'm using chrome canary, and I've tried numerous methods of doing this. What I would expect to work would be:

var u = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance();
  console.log(u.getVoices());

or

var u = new SpeechSynthesisVoiceList();
  console.log(u);

I've also run:

console.log(window)

and I see numerous things regarding the web speech api and speech synthesis, but nothing about voices.

Answer 1

You should use speechSynthesis.getVoices() to get a list of all voices. This is an output from Google Chrome 33:

[{
    "default": true,
    "localService": false,
    "lang": "en-US",
    "name": "Google US English",
    "voiceURI": "Google US English"
}, {
    "default": false,
    "localService": false,
    "lang": "en-GB",
    "name": "Google UK English Male",
    "voiceURI": "Google UK English Male"
}, {
    "default": false,
    "localService": false,
    "lang": "en-GB",
    "name": "Google UK English Female",
    "voiceURI": "Google UK English Female"
}, {
    "default": false,
    "localService": false,
    "lang": "es-ES",
    "name": "Google Español",
    "voiceURI": "Google Español"
}, {
    "default": false,
    "localService": false,
    "lang": "fr-FR",
    "name": "Google Français",
    "voiceURI": "Google Français"
}, {
    "default": false,
    "localService": false,
    "lang": "it-IT",
    "name": "Google Italiano",
    "voiceURI": "Google Italiano"
}, {
    "default": false,
    "localService": false,
    "lang": "de-DE",
    "name": "Google Deutsch",
    "voiceURI": "Google Deutsch"
}, {
    "default": false,
    "localService": false,
    "lang": "ja-JP",
    "name": "Google 日本人",
    "voiceURI": "Google 日本人"
}, {
    "default": false,
    "localService": false,
    "lang": "ko-KR",
    "name": "Google 한국의",
    "voiceURI": "Google 한국의"
}, {
    "default": false,
    "localService": false,
    "lang": "zh-CN",
    "name": "Google 中国的",
    "voiceURI": "Google 中国的"
}, {
    "default": false,
    "localService": true,
    "lang": "",
    "name": "native",
    "voiceURI": "native"
}]