FAQ Section

[jankapunkt]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

We don't have a clear and understandable FAQ

Describe the solution you'd like

We should have some FAQ.md that is in the top-level of the repository. It should explain some important concepts and provide answers to common questions.

Most important it should clearly show what's OS-level (and thus not being influenced by this library), what's browser-specific and what can be influenced by this library.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Using the wiki, but that is problematic as it's not shipped with the NPM package, while the FAQ can be shipped and is offline-readable.

We should also link any issue that is related to this in the FAQ, no matter whether it's open or closed.

Additional context

General topics

• why this library exists?
• can I load my own voices?
• my voices sound terrible
• there is no voice spoken
• can I include a cloud service with this library?

OS-specific topics

These are common issues that may arise but are locked on the OS-level so we can't do a thing about it.

• no voices at all (Chromium on some Linux)
• specific voices missing although installed on OS-level (iOS 16)
• voices gone or changed after update (MacOS, iOS)
• voices sound bad; bad quality (often in Firefox and Chromium on Linux systems)

Good practices to tackle them are

• implement a fallback mechanism using certain voices (for example Chrome always ships some google voices in multiple languages with acceptable quality)
• fail on missing voices and display messages to users with guides on how to install the voices
• what else?

Browser-specific topics

These are issues that are specific to the browser and may only be changed by the vendor

• speechSynthesis or other crucial classes not available in window (for example in Opera)
• speech is automactically cancelled after x seconds or words (chrome)
• pause and stop are doing the same (android)
• what else?

Voice-Specific Voices

• google voice exceed text length (Max Length for Text to read in some voices? #227)