Window: speechSynthesis property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since September 2018.

The speechSynthesis read-only property of the Window object returns a SpeechSynthesis object, which is the entry point into using Web Speech API speech synthesis functionality.

In our basic Speech synthesizer demo, we first grab a reference to the SpeechSynthesis controller using window.speechSynthesis. After defining some necessary variables, we retrieve a list of the voices available using SpeechSynthesis.getVoices() and populate a select menu with them so the user can choose what voice they want.

Inside the inputForm.onsubmit handler, we stop the form submitting with preventDefault(), create a new SpeechSynthesisUtterance instance containing the text from the text <input>, set the utterance's voice to the voice selected in the <select> element, and start the utterance speaking via the SpeechSynthesis.speak() method.

js
const synth = window.speechSynthesis;

const inputForm = document.querySelector("form");
const inputTxt = document.querySelector("input");
const voiceSelect = document.querySelector("select");

function populateVoiceList() {
  voices = synth.getVoices();

  for (const voice of voices) {
    const option = document.createElement("option");
    option.textContent = `${voice.name} (${voice.lang})`;

    if (voice.default) {
      option.textContent += " — DEFAULT";
    }

    option.setAttribute("data-lang", voice.lang);
    option.setAttribute("data-name", voice.name);
    voiceSelect.appendChild(option);
  }
}

populateVoiceList();
if (speechSynthesis.onvoiceschanged !== undefined) {
  speechSynthesis.onvoiceschanged = populateVoiceList;
}

inputForm.onsubmit = (event) => {
  event.preventDefault();

  const utterThis = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance(inputTxt.value);
  const selectedOption =
    voiceSelect.selectedOptions[0].getAttribute("data-name");
  utterThis.voice = voices.find((v) => v.name === selectedOption);
  synth.speak(utterThis);
  inputTxt.blur();
};