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Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

Did Firefox reader mode on Linux loose its TTS feature or was it never present on Linux? It was quite useful feature on macOS but I miss it on Linux now. I guess it has something to do with Pocket.

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Mine has it. I'm guessing it is checking for a library and if it exists then it shows the icon because it showed up after a few seconds.

There are about a 100 different voices that I can choose from and they all suck.

A few months ago we trained a pretty nice DNN TTS engine and I wish I had the permission to release as a free software for Linux. I feel Linux has been in need of a good TTS forever.

I think you're correct, it seems speech-dispatcher was made an optional dependency for firefox build and that Arch requires 'festival-freebsoft-utils'[1] along with 'speech-dispatcher' for narrator but the former hasn't been updated in a long time. Not sure whether that's the reason, but narrator doesn't work even after installing those packages although the speech-dispatcher gets triggered in the firewall when the reader mode is accessed.

Interestingly, this is a closed bug in Arch. Guess it's time to reopen it.

[1]https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/festival-freebsoft-utils/

[2]https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/50886

Reader mode is available (at least on FF version 85). There is a headphone icon appears on the upper left of the page and allows you to set the reading speed and choose from a bunch of different voices.

On Linux? I'm on FF 85 as well and all I see is the Font & Pocket button on the left panel in reader more and the headphone which was available on macOS is missing.

Yes, working here on Linux. Maybe go into about:config and look for "narrate" options, perhaps your "narrate.enable" is set to false?

narrate.enable is true, only narrate.test was false and making it true didn't help. I'll try digging deeper, thanks.

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