Add "Natural" TTS voices to Reader Mode

[blackdagor_28]

For those who use Firefox's Reader Mode, especially Text To Speech, I think it would be a good idea to add some "natural" voices to Reader Mode, and make the distinction between Offline and Online Voices, Offline Voices (system voices) are robotic and sometimes fails to speak words or to pronunciating them well, so, being a browser with 20+ years, Firefox needs to have more innovating features and not going backwards, it would be a good Usability and Accessiblity feature that other browsers like Edge has (the only browser which can be compared with Firefox in terms of features), and Audiobook listeners will be very thankful for this.

I appreciate anyone who could find this a good idea, thank you so much.

[mai-sasaki]

100% agree on updating these. I always want to use this feature, then encounter it and realise the voices are so bad, then don't use the feature. And switch to Edge.

[M4K14]

wow, i was googling for how to solve this issue of robotic voices on Firefox. and now i'm here voting for this feature to be implemented.

[crazyfrog768]

natural TTS for multi-languages would be nice  😉

[rahaaatul]

Come on Mozilla! Please, work on this...

[nilsf]

Also here to agree and add that this feature is very important to me, affects me on Windows and Mac (both showing only legacy voices that are intolerable), and is pushing me toward switching to Safari or Edge, both of which now have compelling natural readers.

[Ray_Palmer]

The addition of Natural TTS would make Firefox the complete browser. I would never have to open Edge after that

[Nutty]

The Daniel (Enhanced) (English) is tolerable, but this TTS option still sounds a little too robotic. Also, "he" mispronounces various words now and then and is unable to read dates like 1984 as "nineteen eight-four" and instead reads those as numeric values such as "one thousand nine hundred eighty four". So even this, being the best TTS option, still needs some improvement.

Coming from the US, it's jarring/distracting to hear British pronunciations for various words, like for example schedule ("shhhedule" instead of "skedule"), so it would be nice to have an equivalent high-quality option with an American accent. I want my mind to focus on the concepts presented in the article being read and not have my mind drawn to all the pronunciations that I'm not used to. For that matter, I'm sure the Irish, Scottish, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Americans, etc. would all appreciate having an option for a native-sounding voice in terms of accent/pronunciation.

And really, I don't understand what use any of the other robotic voices serve. They are so unpleasant and unnatural to listen to. Does anyone actually use them for TTS? If so, why? Personally, I'd get rid of pretty much the entire list of TTS options currently available. I suppose Samantha (English) and Tessa (English) are not horrible, but still very robotic sounding.