Alternative text to speech options

[shiki]

I have a TTS engine Android app which allows for much higher quality TTS options than just those in my default Android settings (Samsung and Google TTS).
The TTS engine app is already useable in other apps such as Ankidroid but not in Pleco which only allows for Google and Samsung options in my case. If Pleco added the option to use other TTS engines available from the Android settings page, then the audio quality experience on Pleco would be massively improved IMO.

 

[mikelove]

It should support any engine Android does - does it maybe work better if you reboot your phone?

 

[shiki]

I just tried rebooting and cleared Pleco's app cache too but still don't have that option.

 

[mikelove]

That's odd... we don't filter that list in any way, we just ask the system for a list of engines and display all of them. What's the name of this other TTS app? Does Ankidroid show it in a list of TTS engines along with the Samsung and Google ones, or does it configure it some other separate way?

 

[shiki]

It's called "TTS Server", I downloaded it from GitHub, not from the google play store.
Ankidroid doesn't show a list, it simply uses the engine that's selected in Android settings as the "preferred engine".
If Pleco could use this "preferred engine" from the Android system that would be perfect.

 

[shiki]

I downloaded and tried another TTS app and also restarted my phone and that app also doesn't get recognized by Pleco on Android. Is there any chance this can be considered for a future update ?

 

[mikelove]

We can investigate why they're not working, but I can't promise that the reason won't be something complicated enough that it would have to wait for a major update like 4.0.

 

[sssssss]

Hey Mike, I just wanted to chime in as a member of a language learning community, a group of us did a fair amount of troubleshooting on this since it is a hot feature for us.

We all followed this guide to install TTS Server or some alternative: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/107h4ax
We found that Pleco would be unable to find the alternate TTS engine on the newer versions of android.
Speaking for my own devices, on Android 10, Pleco is able to locate the engine and on Android 14 it cannot.
Pleco on Huawei's harmonyOS 4.0 tablet was also able to locate it.

I've been dreading upgrading my phone for this reason but had to finally do it today, really loved this feature that much haha. If it ended up being an easy fix I'd be really excited. Thanks for you hard work on Pleco as always. <3

 

[mikelove]

We actually just uploaded a beta to fix a couple of issues with connections to the system TTS which we think may help with this problem too; we're still waiting for Google to review it (because irritatingly they insist on doing that even for beta releases now), but if you go to https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pleco.chinesesystem and sign up for beta testing, it should push to your device automatically once it's approved.

 

[sssssss]

It worked! Awesome!! Thank you I will spread the word!

 

[sssssss]

Ok boss, I have one small report here, on this version, when using the TTS engine with the sticky bottom popup, it highlights the whole sentence and reads it, but the auto scroll seems to only scroll up first line of the text above the popup, so when it reaches the bottom of the page, the popup dictionary will almost always overlap. Changing to non sticky popup has similar but different issues. I believe the previous version scrolled to the bottom of the highlighted paragraph.

Changing the scroll method or allowing us to disable to popup while TTS is going would be helpful, but totally understand if it's not a priority.

 

[mikelove]

I don't think we've changed anything on that - we kind of stopped worrying about sentence-by-sentence highlighting once Google's built-in engine started to support word-by-word.

We actually have a neutral network version of our licensed TTS which we're beta testing on iOS now and also have the rights to on Android, and that has the ability to track playback word by word. I expect that Google will also soon update their offline engine on Android to offer similar quality to this experimental system. So I'd be a little reluctant to put time into improving sentence-by-sentence highlighting when it seems that it will probably only end up as a temporary issue.