[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 243055] REGRESSION: Web Speech API - nullable voice attribute is not supported

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243055

--- Comment #11 from Simon Bates <sbates at ocadu.ca> ---
I have been doing a little more testing and I am seeing a correlation
between Safari speaking when the utterance voice is null and the
availability of a voice that matches the user's locale. When a voice is
available, Safari will speak an utterance with a null voice. But when
a voice is not available, Safari will not speak.

My theory is that only people in countries for which there isn't a
matching voice will be affected by this bug. Which I think explains why it
has been hard to reproduce.

When I evaluate the following expression on my MacBook in Safari 16:

window.speechSynthesis.getVoices().map(voice => voice.lang).filter(lang => lang.startsWith("en")).sort()

I get these 11 voices for English:

- "en-AU"
- "en-GB"
- "en-IE"
- "en-IN"
- "en-IN"
- "en-SCOTLAND"
- "en-US"
- "en-US"
- "en-US"
- "en-US"
- "en-ZA"

When I set my region to one of these countries, Safari will speak. But for
other countries, it will not.

Test method:

1. Quit Safari
2. Set my region in the System Preferences "Language & Region"
3. Check in the terminal: defaults read -g AppleLanguages
4. Start Safari
5. Run in Safari: window.speechSynthesis.speak(new SpeechSynthesisUtterance("hello world"))

Results:

Region          AppleLanguages  speaks?
------          --------------  -------
Australia       en-AU           yes
UK              en-GB           yes
Ireland         en-IE           yes
India           en-IN           yes
US              en-US           yes
South Africa    en-ZA           yes
Canada          en-CA           no
New Zealand     en-NZ           no
Jamaica         en-JM           no

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