Identify recommended voices for English, French, Italian and Spanish

[HadrienGardeur]

Identify recommended voices for English, French, Italian and Spanish

[HadrienGardeur]

All four initial languages (English, French, Spanish and Italian) are covered now.

I'm moving this item to "in review". I'm going to spend additional time reviewing all four files and then document in this issue the current approach.

[HadrienGardeur]

Here's a quick overview of the current approach.

The recommended list for each language is divided into three parts:

• high quality voices
• default voices
• and then Chrome OS and Android voices as they're a bit different from the rest

The top section for high quality voices always contains:

• Microsoft Natural voices at the top since they're the best voices currently available with a very wide selection in Edge (250+ voices). All of these voices are available by default in Edge and some of them can be installed in Windows 11.
• Then higher quality Apple voices. They all require to be downloaded before they can be used and unfortunately, can't be accessed through Safari desktop or mobile.
• And finally Google voices which are preloaded in Chrome Desktop. These voices would be ranked higher than Apple voices without the 14s utterance bug documented in HadrienGardeur/read-aloud-best-practices#3

In the second section for default voices, you'll find:

• The legacy Microsoft voices that can be installed on both Windows 10 and 11, but which are not nearly as good as their Natural voices.
• Then Apple voices that come preloaded on all of their devices.

In the final section, you'll find:

• Voices available on Chrome OS where Android voices are listed alongside Chrome OS own voices. The Android voices are listed higher since they're higher quality.
• and finally Android voices, which are not truly voices, but a list of voices/regions available on Android (you can read the notes in the README for more details)

I've gone back and forth but for now this feels like a good approach. Here's what the default experience will look like across different platforms when implementing these recommended voices:

• Chrome on Windows will default to Google voices, but the user can easily install Microsoft Natural Voices for a better user experience
• Chrome on macOS will default to Google voices but the user can easily install other Apple voices for additional options
• Chrome on Android will only display one or two options per language (one per region) and will require the user to set their preferred voice in system settings
• Chrome on Chrome OS will default to Google voices if available and otherwise fallback to higher quality Android voices
• Safari on all platforms will default to Apple preloaded voices unfortunately
• Edge on Windows or macOS will default to Microsoft Natural voices, providing a wide variety of excellent voices
• Firefox on Windows will default to Microsoft legacy voice packs, but the user can easily install Microsoft Natural Voices for a better user experience
• Firefox on macOS will default to Apple preloaded voices, but the user can easily install additional and improved Apple voices

A Thorium implementation would also be useful, the default experience would be similar to Firefox on Windows and macOS.