Why are websites trying to talk at me?

3 points by LeratoAustini 134 days ago | 4 comments

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?

serf 134 days ago |

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.)

LeratoAustini 134 days ago | |

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.

supernes 134 days ago |

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.

fuzzfactor 134 days ago |

Maybe nobody else was listening?