aaronfireborn@dragonscave.space
Oct 23, 2026, 12:25 PMThe Lemon Balm Google text-to-speech voices are actually really good. I do not understand why they will not allow TalkBack or other screen readers to use them.
Replies
Oct 23, 2026, 3:45 PM@fireborn I don't get it either, but maybe they're slow on some old hardware? Pixels aren't known for their performance and I don't know how far back the Android support for Google TTS goes, but I can imagine someone testing it on a Moto G Play and finding it unusable. The market of actual power users for this stuff is vanishingly small. It's weird not to have the option though, especially as a reading voice when using "Read from Cursor" and such.
- aaronfireborn@dragonscave.spaceOct 23, 2026, 4:09 PM
@simon But then you gate it behind what chip the device has. That's trivially easy to detect. It's very odd, just another googleism I guess.
- Oct 23, 2026, 4:11 PM
@fireborn Yeah, as we've figured out over the last month, a lot of Google's decisions with Talkback have been baffling to say the least. I'm starting to prefer a transparently broken screen reader that can be patched over an opaque black box that breaks in new and infuriating ways that are sometimes but not always entirely unique to you, though.