M
Story
Why are websites trying to talk at me?
Why am I seeing this on so many sites recently (in FireFox)? I've seen it half a dozen times in the past month or so, had never noticed it before then.

"You can't use speech synthesis because the speech dispatcher library is missing"

There's a 'learn more' link, but it just talks about getting speech synthesis working in my browser. Searching for the error string returns similar discussions. I don't want to do that (especially if it's some new marketing fad). Obviously it's speech synthesis but *what is it saying?*

The most recent instance was a dell.com product page posted here on HN:

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-ultrasharp-52-thunderbolt-hub-monitor-u5226kw/apd/210-bthw/monitors-monitor-accessories

As lots of people on HN will have visited that link I thought somebody might be able to tell me what they heard?

I examined that Dell link and speech synthesis is used in the "Virtual Assistant" on-page chat widget. There's a feature check to see if it's available so it shouldn't trigger the way it does for you, that may be a browser issue.
  • serf
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  • 7 hours ago
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a lot of that may be TTS accessibility features.

I know Ubuntu, among others, used to ship Firefox without modules it defaulted into, so it would complain harmlessly and bring up an annoying pop-up-blocked style modal when the TTS module/engine was missing.

(they may still do this, but i'm not up to date.)

Oh so maybe they are just initialising the TTS by default, ready for those who need it for accessibility? That would make sense.

I'm on a Debian, so that ties in with what you mentioned.

It's easy to get rid of the error, I was more just curious. Thought maybe mainstream websites had started blasting speech at users as soon as they arrived.

Maybe nobody else was listening?