Text to speech often doesn't work

This post was made before, but the thread is now closed and I haven’t seen anyone of the team say that they’re willing to work on it. I’m hoping that they just forgot about it, so I want to post a reminder here.

Here you can read about the exact problem and even see a video demonstrate it:

I understand that the team may be very busy with loads of bug reports and feature requests. If that’s the reason that this bug can’t get attention any time soon then I’d love to know. Because then I know that I shouldn’t wait for it and look for an alternative for now.

Also, I’m also a programmer and I know that the most annoying bugs are bugs that only appear occasionally. Which is the case for this bug. It sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, even when you’re trying it on the exact same piece of text. So I empathize if that makes you less excited to start debugging this. I’d just like to know what I can expect in terms of this bug getting attention from the team.

@Evert,
We have some known issues with microphone/text to speech sites/functions, but can you tell me what websites you’re seeing this behavior on?

This forum is an example. Just now, I selected the first paragraph of my post at the top and instead of reading the paragraph, it sounded like my MacBook was reading either the entire web page from top to bottom.

@Evert,
So I just tested this feature on Community and was able to:

  • Highlight text and use the shortcut key specified in the Accessibility settings and have the OS speak the selected text.
  • Highlight text and right-click and select Speech from the context menu and have the OS speak the selected text.

Do you have any extensions installed in the browser at this time?

Okay, so the really annoying thing is that this bug only appears sometimes.

For example, when I just received an email that you had responded to me here, and I clicked the Visit Topic button and I selected the first sentence of your comment and hit option+escape to trigger the text to speech, it started by saying “community.brave.com”. But then the second time it did work as expected and just read your comment out loud.

It’s super annoying, because that means I can’t even make a video demonstration of the problem. By the way, the right-click -> Speech -> Start speaking method always works, but for some reason it almost always picks a different voice. A more basic voice than the one I’ve actually selected.

My extensions are:

  • Bitwarden - Free Password Manager
  • Block Site - Website Blocker for Chrome™
  • Dark Reader
  • Google Docs Offline
  • Google Translate
  • MijnGeldzaken Assistent
  • Picture-in-Picture for Chrome
  • Svelte Devtools
  • Tel Linker
  • Todoist for Chrome
  • View Image
  • Vue.js devtools
  • Xdebug helper

@Evert,
That’s a lot of extensions – I would ask you to try disabling them all to test a theory but with that many it would be faster to simply create a new browser profile and test the function to see if you get the same results.

Can you try going to Main menu --> Create new profile and try the text to speech function using this new profile? Let me know what you find out – you’re also welcome to delete this new profile once you’re done testing.

Again it’s gonna be very hard to test since I can’t reliably reproduce the result. So I’m gonna leave this thread alone for now, until I happen to stumble upon a website where this bug reliably pops up. And then I’ll try and see if any of the extensions are interfering. Just FYI though, I was using the exact same list of extensions on Chrome, before I switched to Brave, and on Chrome I never came across this issue.

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