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Show HN: Pronounce – practice while you browse for any language

github.com

40 pointsfilipeisho25 comments

Sounds useful but I had to turn it off almost immediately due to poor UX. Some suggestions:

- Let me toggle this on and off by clicking its icon (hijacking the double click on every site I visit is both intrusive and annoying);

- Better yet, don't inject any script until I activate it;

- Please, don't pollute my JS console with debug and other logs (find a way to turn it off in production version) :)

Don't get me wrong, I think you had a great idea with this extensions. You just needs to polish it up a little bit.

Damn, thanks for the feedback! You are completely right on everything, I am going to do another release asap. Thanks again!

Hello again! I just came back to let you know that the new release is up and all of these problems have been solved :)

Thanks, I'll check out!

Sounds like a useful extension that I might have liked to try (I'm using Chrome). But I'm wary of extensions that I need to load from other locations than the Google webstore - the webstore at least provides some guarantee against abusive extensions (or that become abusive after a while).

You say that the it "infuriates you" that Google demands payment for adding an extension to the Chrome web store - but it's only $5 FCOL [0]. Their motivation is purportedly to stave abusive extensions, and it might actually work like that to some degree (as well as contributing minimally to their cashflow). But regardless, $5 for an otherwise free service that gives you a much farther reach than your current method - might be worth it.

[0] https://9to5google.com/2020/03/12/chrome-web-store-fee/

hear! hear! I would add an extension from the webstore to play with for a few minutes, but wouldn't install something from a 3rd party website without enough research to make sure it was worth it.

Add paypal, buymeacoffee link and you'll likely recoupe the $5

Thanks helsinkiandrew, but there is no need! I will try to get it into the chrome store ASAP.

In a sense, it's "safer" to install extensions which you can download yourself from source which is open and auditable.

Google's webstore does indeed remove extensions that exhibit bad behaviour, but they don't audit the extension source code along with all updates to my knowledge.

At the time I wrote the readme of the repo none of my friends found the extension useful so I was skeptical about paying 5$ for something I wasn't sure anyone would use... You are totally right, it's only 5$ and it was very irrational of me to not have paid. Thanks for pointing out this, I am going to begin the application process next week :)

By "any language" the author actually means the 48 most popular dialects.

Less common languages like Estonian are not supported.

Haha sorry - I never thought anyone would miss a language that isn't in the Web Speech API of firefox/chrome...

Kind of already exists on iOS thanks to accessibility tools (with more languages supported, like Chinese): after enabling it a "Speak" button appears when selecting text. Good idea anyway and nice to have executed it.

I just found the setting in iOS and it works great! Thanks for pointing this out.. I was looking for a way to implement it on iOS but now there is no need :)

Hey, this is awesome! I've been Google Dictrionary for Chrome which has the same functionality but it seems to only work for English. I'd deffinitely try it out if it was on the Chrome webstore.

I will take a look again on the application process for the chrome store... If a lot of people find it useful I don't mind paying the fee :)

Love it! I'm using it for Spanish and I can already tell this will help me a lot. Thanks for making this.

I am glad you like it!

Interesting. Would be great if it also showed IPA when double-clicking.

It is a good idea! I will try to implement it and get a setting inside the menu-bar to enable/disable it.

Doesn't work at all for me in Firefox.

Sorry to hear.. Dumb question but have you tried restarting firefox?

I didn't. Addon using WebExtension API shouldn't normally require browser restart, if it does and doesn't even notify user about that, I would consider that bug too.

There is no need to restart it... Someone mentioned on the github repository that for Arch Linux and other distros the TTS engine I am using (SpeechSynthesis api) is not linked.. If you are running linux depending on your distro that is probably causing the bug

Great work! I've tested it with French.

I just wish the voice wasn't so robotic.

Yeah, it gives you an idea of how something is pronounced but it is not satisfying at all... Unfortunately I am using the SpeechSynthesis API and I have no way of making the voices more natural.

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