Voice Instead

Yet another TTS (text to speech) extension, with natural voice.

Tired of reading long text? why not convert text to speech so that you can hear the text on websites?

This extension helps you select and speak text in your browser with the following two advantages:

(1) Voice Instead uses TTS(text to speech) engine in human voice quality.

(2) Voice Instead enables extremely long text to be read by a single click without a long delay, and the speech is very smooth!

(3) Voice Instead supports 10+ languages. Usage: Select text on any Chrome page (even PDF file!), right click, and select `voice instead'. Now enjoy the human voice quality speech! Click Chrome upper-right pop-up icon to adjust API parameters. * Ignore references formatted in square brackets, e.g. [2]. * Fix IBM Watson API calling. * Handle voice loading error on UI. * Disable bottom captions according to user feedback (since it is distracting).

• Fix jumping read if VoiceRSS API is used.
• Better handle extreme long sentence without punctuation sign.
• Randomly distribute API availability to reduce heavy traffic on top-rated API.
• Change into subscription model.
• Introduce Amazon API to relieve heavy usage of IBM API.
• Better split algorithm, best effort to avoid pause-in-the-middle problem.
• Identify Chinese punctuation signs (in Unicode).
• Change voicerss API voice_gap from 1.2 to 0.55
• Set default shortcut key: 'Ctrl+Q'
• Display reading text.
• Enable to configure a keyboard shortcut for reading selected text
• Provide speed option for IBM API. Introduce a new Baidu API.
• Rewrite framework, enable to read in background, and support more languages.
• Update IBM API URL, drop voicerss API temporarily because its "Referer" restriction.
• Fixed panel image style to avoid unintended CSS inheritance.
• Introduce IBM TTS API.