"The tts dispatcher thing and the text highlight is completely out of sync on
desktop." Firefox + speech-dispatcher (like iOS) reports no onboundary events,
so the highlight rode a pure estimate - and a 130-word section drifts seconds
away from an engine that speaks at its own pace.
- On platforms without boundaries the system engine now speaks one sentence
at a time, and every finished utterance re-anchors the clock: measured
duration vs estimate, smoothed (half old, half new, clamped to 0.25-4x).
Drift cannot accumulate past a sentence.
- The per-word estimate is punctuation-aware (full stop ~260ms, comma ~130ms).
- Once a boundary does arrive (Chrome), the rest of the section goes back to
a single utterance with the exact clock - the accurate path is unchanged.
- When a boundary lands mid-section, the remainder is spoken as one utterance
(it used to skip to the next section).
podcast-test's engine stub finishes utterances now and pins the whole thing:
one sentence first, the next following on its own, the highlight inside the
spoken text, a boundary collapsing the remainder, the highlight advancing.
53 checks. Version 0.7.10, SW v102.
"It only plays once, and when you pause it you can't unpause."
WebKit leaves speechSynthesis paused after a cancel(), and every later
speak() is queued into that paused state - silently. Fixes:
- resume() whenever the synth is paused, before speaking and after our own
cancel;
- a ~90ms beat before a speak() that follows a cancel (several engines drop
it otherwise);
- no cancel when nothing is pending.
The speech engine also no longer rebuilds on rate or voice changes: both are
read live through getters, so a voiceschanged arriving after the first
utterance cannot leave a second engine speaking over the first. A rate or
voice change restarts the current part from the same word instead (the Web
Speech API cannot change either mid-utterance), making the change audible at
once; the natural engine applies speed live and resumes across a voice swap.
The suite's speech stub now models the quirk (cancel -> paused, speak while
paused is dropped and counted) and pins that nothing is ever spoken into a
paused engine. 44 checks. Version 0.7.7, SW v99.
Two reports, one root: the platform's speech engine.
"Loud cracking at the end of every sentence" is the browser/OS TTS popping
between its internal sentence chunks (an idle cancel makes it worse). Hygiene
for that path: never cancel when nothing is pending, normalise the spoken text
(control characters, ellipses, dashes), and a 140ms beat between sections so
speech never runs into the engine's tail.
The real fix is a second voice source that does not use the platform engine:
- lib/providers carries TTS profiles (OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts, Groq
playai-tts, any OpenAI-compatible /audio/speech behind the custom provider),
male voices first.
- /api/tts proxies them with the same guards and the key still in headers.
- the picker gains System / Natural, with the provider's voice list.
- lib/podcast-audio plays one clip per section through a hidden <audio>
element, measures the clip's real duration and gives each word a slice of it
proportional to its spoken length - the highlight follows the audio exactly,
and pause/seek/chapters become real audio operations. Clips cache per
session, the next section generates while the current plays, and a voice
change disposes the element and its blobs. Speed applies live (setRate)
without dropping the cache.
podcast-test stubs /api/tts with a real silent WAV and pins the path: the
voice list, the request body, exactly one playing element, and the highlight
riding currentTime. 43 checks. tests/lib.mjs launches Chromium with the
autoplay policy relaxed (a real device has the listener's gesture).
Version 0.7.6, SW v98.
"The scrolling works kinda weirdly" + "maybe a less robotic voice, preferably
male".
Scroll: the transcript now follows by LINE, not by word - words on the same
line never move the page (that was the jitter), a line only scrolls once it
leaves a comfortable band, small corrections are instant rather than animated,
and a wheel/touch/drag on the transcript pauses the following for four seconds
instead of fighting the reader. Chapter jumps and word taps re-centre at once.
Voice: lib/podcast-voices ranks what the platform installed (natural / neural
/ online names up, espeak / SAM / compact down, a male name preferred) and the
player picks the best one automatically; a new picker in the chrome lists
everything in the episode's language, applies it live and remembers the choice
per language. A note points at the system settings when only robotic voices
exist. The engine takes the chosen voice instead of guessing.
podcast-test: 34 checks now (voice ranking, filtered picker, persisted pick,
same-line silence, line following, manual-scroll suspension). Version 0.7.4,
SW v96.
The third segment of the note-powered wizards (Study deck / Homework /
Podcast) takes the same intake - photos, documents, pasted text, the share
target - and turns it into a spoken episode.
- prompts: PODCAST_SYSTEM_PROMPT writes for the ear (plain prose, no markdown,
no visual references), chaptered into 3-8 sections around a length target.
- /api/podcast mirrors /api/generate's plumbing (rate limit, model gate,
provider keys, heartbeats, the 2x deadline, the optional vision pass).
- storage: frezmo.podcasts.v1, zod-validated, included in the backup and the
encrypted sync payload; a new library tab lists episodes with listen /
rename / delete-with-undo, and the wizard switch deep-links in.
- player: the transcript is word-wrapped spans and the word under the voice
rides a lyric-style highlight that keeps itself centred. Two clocks: exact
onboundary events where the browser reports them, a per-word length timer
where it does not (iOS Safari); the first boundary retires the timer.
Pause = cancel + re-speak from the word, which makes resume, chapter jumps
and tap-any-word-to-seek the same operation; the position saves on pause,
page-hide and unmount, so reopening resumes. Speed rebuilds the engine and
keeps playing; the Aero soundtrack pauses itself when the voice starts; a
browser with no voice gets an honest note and a readable transcript.
- the script sits on a glass pane (plain paragraphs over Aero's grass failed
contrast; the scan now covers the player too).
tests/podcast-test.mjs (17th suite) stubs the model and the speech engine and
drives the highlight by hand: 26 checks. All suites green, contrast clean.
Version 0.7.3, SW v95.
