I think someone mentioned it before, at the very least it's in my personal list as a TTS service to look into at some point.
It shouldn't be an issue to add more TTS services, ZoTTS was actually built from the ground up to support more than just the basic Web Speech API (ie the voices you have installed on your computer).
And I just checked and Speechify seem to have good documentation about how to access their services.
So in summary, sure, I'd be happy to add Speechify to ZoTTS!
Just two caveats to mention though:
Firstly, while I enjoy developing ZoTTS, and love that it's useful to others, it's not my day job so I can't guarantee if/when anything gets added. I've just spent the last two months moving house and starting a job which has basically halted all work on ZoTTS... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Secondly, Speechify is a paid service, and as such it would be up to you the user to cover the subscription unfortunately. The same is true of other paid TTS services like Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, or Microsoft Azure.
hi! great job on that plugin, I really appreciate the work you put into it! I just wanted to give you a heads-up because the play/pause/cancel buttons in the top right are not showing, so I wanted to make sure that's just on my end. cheers, thaz
Yeah occasionally users will see no buttons (or sometimes double buttons when the plugin updates).
It's a fairly minor problem so I haven't got round to fixing it, until then the solution is just to close and reopen Zotero and/or the tabs in question.
Let me know if you have any further issues/feature requests/etc :D
(And fyi that I'm generally much more responsive on GitHub, though I do try to pop in here where I can)
First of all, I would like to say a big thank you for this plug-in as well. I was very happy when I found it. I have a question about the language used by ZoTTS. I read my texts in German, English, and Spanish, but I haven't found a way to change the language of instruction. Is that possible? How does ZoTTS ‘decide’ which language to use? Currently, it reads all texts with a German pronunciation, which makes it a bit difficult to follow the English texts :). Is there a trick? Has anyone else had these problems?
Thanks for your comment, I'm really glad ZoTTS is useful to you!
As for the language/pronunciation thing, ZoTTS doesn't make any distinction between languages/letters/pronunciation/etc, in fact ZoTTS doesn't even have any voices in it, it just acts as a bridge between Zotero and whatever TTS is installed on your computer's operating system.
What's probably happening is that you're trying to read English text, but have a voice selected that's designed for German, so it's pronouncing it with an "accent" unintentionally.
You should be able to fix the issue by selecting a voice that's designed for English. You may need to download additional voices for your system (in Windows it's under Settings > Time and Language > Add a Language, on MacOS I think it's in the accessibility settings, Linux I'm not sure)
Fyi you can also create "favourite" voices/settings and cycle through them with Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + Q, this will allow you to change voices quickly without having to go into the ZoTTS settings every time you want to read a paper on a different language.
@Imperial_Squid - As a dyslexic, thank you so much for putting so much effort into creating this plug in! I just installed it today, as I start grad school next week. I find that when I try to get it to start reading, it will once but if I stop it and come back, it will say, "speak selection from here is not unique" and the only fix seems to be to shut down the app and restart it. I am not computer savy so it might be an issue on my end, but do you have any suggestions?
Hi @emily.woodall thanks for your lovely comment, I'm so glad ZoTTS is useful to you!
Hmm, pausing or cancelling shouldn't affect "speak from here"-ing.
When attempting to do a "speak from here", ZoTTS searches for the text you have selected in the full text of the paper, but if the text you highlighted occurs more than once it doesn't know which section you have highlighted so it doesn't know where to start.
As an example of I have the text "I like bananas. Apples too. But mostly I like bananas." and select "I like bananas" there's no way to know if it was the first or second bit of text without more context.
It's super simple to fix though, you just need to _highlight more text_ until the selection has enough context that it can be uniquely identified ("I like bananas. Apples" or "mostly I like bananas" would work in the example).
Hope that helps! If you continue having problems please do reach out (I'm more responsive on GitHub or in my emails but I try to drop by here when I can!)
And do let me know if you have any bug reports/feature requests/etc.
Upgrade Storage
I think someone mentioned it before, at the very least it's in my personal list as a TTS service to look into at some point.
It shouldn't be an issue to add more TTS services, ZoTTS was actually built from the ground up to support more than just the basic Web Speech API (ie the voices you have installed on your computer).
And I just checked and Speechify seem to have good documentation about how to access their services.
So in summary, sure, I'd be happy to add Speechify to ZoTTS!
Just two caveats to mention though:
Firstly, while I enjoy developing ZoTTS, and love that it's useful to others, it's not my day job so I can't guarantee if/when anything gets added. I've just spent the last two months moving house and starting a job which has basically halted all work on ZoTTS... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Secondly, Speechify is a paid service, and as such it would be up to you the user to cover the subscription unfortunately. The same is true of other paid TTS services like Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, or Microsoft Azure.
great job on that plugin, I really appreciate the work you put into it!
I just wanted to give you a heads-up because the play/pause/cancel buttons in the top right are not showing, so I wanted to make sure that's just on my end.
cheers,
thaz
Report on this issue: https://github.com/ImperialSquid/zotero-zotts/issues/107
Suggested solution: https://github.com/ImperialSquid/zotero-zotts/issues/107#issuecomment-2356733984
Yeah occasionally users will see no buttons (or sometimes double buttons when the plugin updates).
It's a fairly minor problem so I haven't got round to fixing it, until then the solution is just to close and reopen Zotero and/or the tabs in question.
Let me know if you have any further issues/feature requests/etc :D
(And fyi that I'm generally much more responsive on GitHub, though I do try to pop in here where I can)
First of all, I would like to say a big thank you for this plug-in as well. I was very happy when I found it.
I have a question about the language used by ZoTTS. I read my texts in German, English, and Spanish, but I haven't found a way to change the language of instruction. Is that possible? How does ZoTTS ‘decide’ which language to use? Currently, it reads all texts with a German pronunciation, which makes it a bit difficult to follow the English texts :). Is there a trick? Has anyone else had these problems?
Thank you very much for your support.
Joe
(I am using Zotero 7 on Windows 11.)
Thanks for your comment, I'm really glad ZoTTS is useful to you!
As for the language/pronunciation thing, ZoTTS doesn't make any distinction between languages/letters/pronunciation/etc, in fact ZoTTS doesn't even have any voices in it, it just acts as a bridge between Zotero and whatever TTS is installed on your computer's operating system.
What's probably happening is that you're trying to read English text, but have a voice selected that's designed for German, so it's pronouncing it with an "accent" unintentionally.
You should be able to fix the issue by selecting a voice that's designed for English. You may need to download additional voices for your system (in Windows it's under Settings > Time and Language > Add a Language, on MacOS I think it's in the accessibility settings, Linux I'm not sure)
Fyi you can also create "favourite" voices/settings and cycle through them with Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + Q, this will allow you to change voices quickly without having to go into the ZoTTS settings every time you want to read a paper on a different language.
As a dyslexic, thank you so much for putting so much effort into creating this plug in! I just installed it today, as I start grad school next week. I find that when I try to get it to start reading, it will once but if I stop it and come back, it will say, "speak selection from here is not unique" and the only fix seems to be to shut down the app and restart it. I am not computer savy so it might be an issue on my end, but do you have any suggestions?
Hmm, pausing or cancelling shouldn't affect "speak from here"-ing.
When attempting to do a "speak from here", ZoTTS searches for the text you have selected in the full text of the paper, but if the text you highlighted occurs more than once it doesn't know which section you have highlighted so it doesn't know where to start.
As an example of I have the text "I like bananas. Apples too. But mostly I like bananas." and select "I like bananas" there's no way to know if it was the first or second bit of text without more context.
It's super simple to fix though, you just need to _highlight more text_ until the selection has enough context that it can be uniquely identified ("I like bananas. Apples" or "mostly I like bananas" would work in the example).
Hope that helps! If you continue having problems please do reach out (I'm more responsive on GitHub or in my emails but I try to drop by here when I can!)
And do let me know if you have any bug reports/feature requests/etc.