Piper voices changing speed also changes pitch

[MendyBerger]

Hey :wave:, thanks for this amazing extension! I love it!!!

Piper voices were added recently, the voices are great, and it works really well with ReadAloud!

One problem I did notice is that changing speed changes the pitch by a lot. Is this a fixable problem?

Thanks again for the amazing work!

[ken107]

I have made the fix in the https://github.com/ken107/piper-browser-extension repo, it will be released soon. Thank you for the bug report!

[MendyBerger]

Thanks so much @ken107! Really appreciate it!

Just curious, why is that a separate extension?

[ken107]

Ah, Read Aloud actually opens https://piper.ttstool.com and use that tool to synthesize Piper voices. The code for that page is in the repository above. And that repository releases a separate extension to provide Piper voices, not for Read Aloud, but generally for the browser and can be used by other websites and extensions. Yea, it's complicated.

[MendyBerger]

@ken107 I see. So does that mean that the fix will eventually trickle down to ReadAloud?

[ken107]

They share the code, so the fix fixes both.

[ken107]

Unfortunately I have to revert the change. We'll have to figure this out later.

The change worked by switching to using HTMLAudioElement instead of the Web Audio API to playback the synthesized speech. Unlike the latter, changing playbackRate on HTMLAudioElement does not affect pitch. However, turns out HTMLAudioElement suffers from a restriction where playback cannot begin unless the tab is active.

[AvAkanksh]

@ken107 when can we expect to get this update ?

[ken107]

Not soon, sorry. I've exceeded my time allocation for this project for now.