Text to Speech (TTS)

[pascalfree]

Hi,

I was recently thinking about how convenient it could be to have my news feeds being read to me.
Text to speech is integrated into android and looking at the documentation it seems not to hard to use it in the app. I will probably try it myself when I find the time (which will not happen this year).

Some additional thoughts on this feature:

• Run in background, so one can open other apps, while listening to the feeds
• Option to automatically move on to the next feed at the end of the current one.
• Language detection and/or option to set the language of a feed

I hope using TTS will not pose a problem when publishing the app to f-droid.

[armaccloud]

I agree, this would be great added functionality! My current workaround is to share an article with Pocket and then use TTS from there, but that's far from ideal since it requires several steps.

[pascalfree]

Thank you for the basic implemention.
It works fine. However some articles will not be read. The play button is showing in the corner but can not be pressed. I could not find out yet, how the unreadable articles are different.
Has anybody else the same issue?

[schnackOpPlatt]

I would like to have a playlist feature, so that I can push RSS (with TTS)/Podcast (both!) - posts to this playlist. Like the star for the Favorites.

[sotpapathe]

Both Pico TTS and Google TTS engines work fine for articles in English. However for articles in Greek there is no output at all. Even if I set the Google TTS language to Greek there is no output for Greek articles while English articles are read with a Greek accent.

Maybe this is an issue with the encoding used when calling Html.fromHtml(rssItem.getBody()).toString().

[David-Development]

@sotpapathe Hi thanks for the pointer, do you have an example rss feed for me where the tts is not working?

[sotpapathe]

Here is the one I tested: https://thepressproject.gr/feed/rss/
I could search for others if you need them.

[David-Development]

Thanks for the link.. Weird.. the given feed is working on my phone running android 10 (using google tts). I'm not sure if it is correct what he's reading to me but it sounds like it 😅 Is there anything special about your phone setup? Which version of the app are you using?

[sotpapathe]

I'm running Android 7.1.2 (LineageOS with MicroG), app version 0.9.9.25 from F-Droid (the latest currently). Maybe it's due to the fact that I don't have the official GSF installed but I use MicroG instead?

If you have no idea what you're listening to it's probably Greek 😄

[sotpapathe]

Since the app on F-Droid was updated to version 0.9.9.32 TTS now properly works for Greek, thanks!

[David-Development]

Awesome, thanks for the feedback! Closing this issue then :)

[sotpapathe]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but it looks like the issue is not completely resolved yet. TTS seems to fail for larger articles, from my tests articles that are roughly larger than 7 KiB. It does not seem to matter whether the articles contain any images or videos. I have attached an archive with the text of several articles, both ones working fine and ones where TTS fails in case they help in debugging. They are all from the feed I linked to earlier https://thepressproject.gr/feed/rss/

nextcloud_news_TTS_tests.zip