Apple should allow the use of Siri voices through the WebSpeech API

[HadrienGardeur]

On macOS, Siri voices are the best preloaded voices available on the platform.

In addition to the compact voices (preloaded), there are also higher quality variants that can be downloaded from the system settings.

Unfortunately, none of these voices are available in browsers through the WebSpeech API. This is unfortunate, since high quality preloaded voices are the most important ones when implementers/users need a default option.

Links:

• TBD

[HadrienGardeur]

These higher quality Siri voices are also available on iOS and iPadOS but without the compact variant installed by default.

This issue has been labeled under macOS since iOS and iPadOS suffer from a major issue with installed voices, as documented in #19.

[HadrienGardeur]

In iOS/iPadOS 18 and on macOS Sequoia, Apple has introduced even more voice variants for Siri and has improved the "naturalness" of every variant.

It's also worth pointing out that the read aloud feature implemented in Safari uses these Siri voices.

Since Apple is primarily focusing on Siri for high quality voices, it makes it even more important for them to allow access to these voices, through native APIs and the Web Speech API.

[HadrienGardeur]

Some additional Siri voices are now showing up in non-Safari browsers on macOS but with no option to use their higher quality variant: #47