Upgrade StorageRussian Read Aloud is only available through Premium voices, but the monthly limit is too low
Hi Zotero team,
I purchased the $120/year Zotero Unlimited Storage subscription mainly because I wanted to use the new Read Aloud feature for reading my books and PDFs in Russian.
The problem is that, in practice, Russian seems to be available only through Premium voices. The Standard voices are unlimited with my Storage subscription, but the Standard voice tier has a limited language selection, and I do not see Russian available there.
As a result, the feature that I actually need is limited to roughly 2 hours per month through Premium voices. For reading books and long PDFs, 2 hours per month is extremely low. One book alone can easily require many more hours of listening time.
I understand that Premium voices use external text-to-speech providers and therefore have real costs. I am not necessarily asking for unlimited Premium voices for free. But right now the situation is confusing from a user perspective: I paid for a Storage subscription expecting Read Aloud to be useful for Russian texts, but the unlimited Standard tier does not support Russian for me, and the Premium tier is too limited for real reading.
Could you clarify whether there are any plans to do one of the following?
1. Add Russian support to Standard voices.
2. Offer a paid option to buy additional Premium Voice minutes.
3. Offer a higher Read Aloud plan for heavy users.
4. Allow users to connect their own external TTS API provider.
5. Allow better integration with local TTS voices or local TTS servers.
For users who read a lot of Russian books and research materials, the current limit makes Read Aloud difficult to use as a real reading tool, even with a paid Zotero subscription.
Thank you.
I purchased the $120/year Zotero Unlimited Storage subscription mainly because I wanted to use the new Read Aloud feature for reading my books and PDFs in Russian.
The problem is that, in practice, Russian seems to be available only through Premium voices. The Standard voices are unlimited with my Storage subscription, but the Standard voice tier has a limited language selection, and I do not see Russian available there.
As a result, the feature that I actually need is limited to roughly 2 hours per month through Premium voices. For reading books and long PDFs, 2 hours per month is extremely low. One book alone can easily require many more hours of listening time.
I understand that Premium voices use external text-to-speech providers and therefore have real costs. I am not necessarily asking for unlimited Premium voices for free. But right now the situation is confusing from a user perspective: I paid for a Storage subscription expecting Read Aloud to be useful for Russian texts, but the unlimited Standard tier does not support Russian for me, and the Premium tier is too limited for real reading.
Could you clarify whether there are any plans to do one of the following?
1. Add Russian support to Standard voices.
2. Offer a paid option to buy additional Premium Voice minutes.
3. Offer a higher Read Aloud plan for heavy users.
4. Allow users to connect their own external TTS API provider.
5. Allow better integration with local TTS voices or local TTS servers.
For users who read a lot of Russian books and research materials, the current limit makes Read Aloud difficult to use as a real reading tool, even with a paid Zotero subscription.
Thank you.
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/510918/#Comment_510918