Aar318's Live Chat TTS

Text-to-Speech for Twitch, Kick, and YouTube Live chat with voice controls, message filters, and per-user rules.

**🔊 Aar318's Live Chat TTS: Customizable Live Chat Text-to-Speech** Listen to Twitch, Kick, and YouTube Live chat while you watch. Live Chat TTS reads newly arriving messages aloud with your browser's built-in speech voices and gives you direct control over voice, volume, rate, pitch, usernames, bots, message lengths, queue behavior, and per-user or per-channel rules. **🚀 Getting Started** 1. Install the extension, then refresh an open Twitch, Kick, or active YouTube Live page. 2. Left-click the injected **TTS** control or extension icon to enable chat reading. 3. Left-click **Queue** for pause, skip, replay, clear, volume, and current/next-message controls. 4. Right-click either injected button to open Settings, then choose a voice and adjust volume, rate, pitch, filters, and rules. 5. Use voice preview to hear “A, A, R, 3, 1, 8's live chat TTS.” New installations start disabled until you turn TTS on. **✨ New Features (v1.75.0.1)** - **Bug Fix:** The reader sidebar opens on the reading page, ignores untargeted page-switch messages, and closes through Firefox's native sidebar control. - **Improvement:** Keep the browser-fallback reason visible during playback and distinguish natural speech, browser speech and resuming playback. - **New Feature:** Fast CPU natural voice (LJ, American English) offers a lighter alternative to the eight Kokoro voices. Download either engine separately; no account or API key. - **New Feature:** Check this PC measures new-text generation and recommends a tested engine or browser voices. Results stay on this device; your selected voice never changes automatically. - **Improvement:** Start long natural readings with a short section and prepare the next section during playback. Recently generated text replays without regeneration when voice and rate match. - **Improvement:** Separate Reader and Natural voices page views share one tab, with Close and return, clear download details and one-click deletion of the selected engine. - **Bug Fix:** Resume existing audio immediately, ignore duplicate Start/Play clicks, keep preparation responsive, and show completion promptly. - **Bug Fix:** Read actual source text, including edits immediately before Play or Resume. - **Bug Fix:** Reset voice, channel and speaker rates to 1.0 once while preserving volume, pitch and subsequent changes. - **Improvement:** Preview every natural voice promptly without downloading its engine. Samples spell A, A, R, 3, 1, 8 and retain rate/volume controls. - **New Feature:** Keep the document reader beside webpages in the browser sidebar. - **New Feature:** Remember volume, rate and pitch separately for each voice across chat and the reader. - **Improvement:** Pronounce common emoji, flags and keycaps, preserve joined emoji, and group repeats. - **Bug Fix:** Align checkbox labels and keep the full label clickable. - **Bug Fix:** Limit natural chat preparation to three seconds, suppress late playback, and temporarily use browser voices after a slow attempt. Document reading has a separate preparation allowance. - **Improvement:** Put available Natural, Neural, Premium and Enhanced browser voices first, identify device/online voices, and preserve saved choices. - **Bug Fix:** Handle stale tabs gracefully after extension updates and load packaged voices without cache warnings. - **New Feature:** Optional Conversation turns groups up to five consecutive queued messages from one speaker; off by default. - **Bug Fix:** Coordinate document, preview and chat playback across tabs to prevent interruptions. - **Bug Fix:** Retry temporary browser-sync failures while retaining visible errors and explicit conflict resolution. **⭐ Key Features** - Default-enabled automatic browser-profile sync for eligible preferences, with clear status and a choice when copies differ. - Backup & Restore provides portable preference files, validated imports, and a local safety copy before restores. - Wait for Live Translator before narrating chat when translation is enabled, with an original-text fallback and preserved queue order. - Optional Conversation turns groups up to five consecutive waiting messages from one speaker into natural narration; disabled by default. - **Preference backups:** Browser-account sync enabled by default, explicit conflict resolution, portable preference files, and a local safety copy before restores. The backup page identifies excluded saved data. - **Optional Translator Coordination:** With Live Translator enabled, narration uses its selected target language before speech. Original text is used if translation is unavailable, disabled or times out. Voice selection remains controlled by TTS settings. - **Annual Holiday Themes:** Moving observances are calculated for the relevant year and holiday styling is ready when the controls appear. - **Bot Filtering:** Skip configured bot-style notices while retaining ordinary messages. - **Real-Time Chat Reading:** Watches Twitch, Kick, and active YouTube Live chat and queues newly arriving messages for speech. - **Natural Voice Option:** Choose Fast CPU with LJ American English (about 64 MB) or eight Kokoro American/British English voices (about 88 MB). Speech runs locally after the optional download. Check this PC recommends based on measured new-text speed without changing your choice. Browser remains the default and fallback. Engine and voice choices follow preference backups; downloaded files stay on each device. - **Browser Voice Controls:** Choose an installed browser or operating-system voice and customize volume, speech rate, and pitch. - **Compact Queue Controller:** Pause/resume, skip, replay, clear, change volume, and see current, next, and waiting speech without opening the full settings panel. - **One-Click Preview:** Test the selected voice, volume, rate, and pitch with coordinated playback across supported tabs. - **Easy Controls:** Toggle TTS from the page or extension icon; use right-click menus to open settings, stop speech immediately, speak selected text, or access support links. - **Reading Progress:** Optionally retain the last document and passage locally, with estimated total and remaining narration time that adapts to completed passages. - **Document and E-book Narration:** Open the responsive On-Demand Reader from Settings or the extension right-click menu. Document extraction stays local; narration privacy depends on the selected speech engine. - **Speak Selected Text:** Select text on a supported streaming page, right-click it, and choose **Speak selected text**. - **Subscriptions and Gifts:** Announces supported subscriptions, resubscriptions, Prime/Tier plans, individual gifts, community gifts, memberships, raids, donation-style notices, and optional first-time chat notices with duplicate protection. - **Priority Rules:** Important events, highlighted or paid messages, favorites, and selected users can move ahead of ordinary chat. - **Per-Channel Profiles and State:** Restore distinct voices, speech controls, pronunciation, filters, anti-spam settings, priorities, and user rules. Remembering a stream's on/off state and continuing narration after a raid are separate opt-in settings, both off by default. - **Per-User Rules:** Prioritize, mute, rename, or assign custom voice, rate, and pitch settings to individual chatters. Priority messages bypass ordinary length filters. - **Custom Name Pronunciations:** Use configuration files or simple `username:value` entries, with recent-username autocomplete, Tab completion, and built-in smart pronunciation cleanup. - **Bot and Command Controls:** Common bots are excluded by default; an optional allowlist and user-created command-output patterns can announce useful bot results without speaking the bot name or emoji. - **Message and Spam Cleanup:** Compress repeated emoji, clarify commands and mentions, condense recognized bot results, apply optional length limits, and collapse highly similar copy-paste floods. - **Queue and Duplicate Protection:** Caps the queue and recent-message history, coordinates duplicate live-chat tabs, prevents re-rendered/backlog messages from replaying, retries voice startup, and resumes genuine interruptions near the last completed word. - **Settings Backup:** Export or import complete settings with merge or overwrite options for reader resume preferences and bookmarks (document text excluded), preferences, profiles, channel states, custom command patterns, mappings, bots, filters, anti-spam, priorities, and per-user rules. - **Responsive Interface:** Includes desktop and touch-friendly controls, right-side mobile safe-area placement, scrollable settings, platform-specific colors, and seasonal themes applied consistently across adjacent controls. - **Optional On-Page Controls:** Hide injected controls while retaining toolbar and context-menu commands. **🔐 Permissions & Privacy** - **Side panel access (where supported):** Keeps extension tools open beside webpages. It does not add website-data access. **Browser profile sync and preference backups:** Open Backup & Restore from the toolbar context menu or settings. Sync is enabled by default unless you turn it off. Use the same browser account with extension synchronization enabled; If your browser requests optional sync data permissions, approve them in Backup & Restore before transfers begin. Eligible preferences are transferred by the browser's account service; Aar318 does not receive them. This is not cross-browser-vendor synchronization or guaranteed backup retention after uninstall. File exports remain available without an account. Synced snapshots are compressed, not independently encrypted by the extension; do not put secrets in preference fields. Oversized preferences remain local with a visible error. Imports validate the extension and schema, merge included preferences, save a local safety copy, and disable sync until re-enabled. Existing tabs may need a reload. Credentials, saved login sessions, document/chat content, transient state, and notification-delivery history are excluded. Saved lists and other content excluded by the backup page continue to use the extension's existing export tools. Disabling sync preserves local settings; deletion of the synced copy is a separate confirmed action. Other enabled devices can republish a deleted copy. **Alarms:** Schedules delayed preference synchronization without keeping background code running continuously. **Storage:** Retains local preferences, sync state, a local safety copy, and the browser-account preference snapshot. Preference sync needs no provider login. All executable code is bundled locally. - **Optional Translation:** When Live Translator is enabled, narration text is passed locally to it and sent to Google Translate for translation. No chat data is sent to Aar318. The companion is optional. - **Active Tab:** Identifies the supported page where the user invokes a toolbar command so access can be granted to that site only. - **Storage:** Saves TTS state, voice settings, rate, pitch, mappings, channel profiles and enabled states, custom command patterns, per-user rules, bot preferences, filters, anti-spam and priority settings, appearance, injected-control visibility, and recent-username autocomplete data. - **Context Menus:** Adds user-invoked commands to toggle TTS, open settings, stop speech, speak selected text, and open support links. - **Scripting:** Restores the packaged TTS controls on already-open supported chat tabs after an update or site-access grant. No remote code is loaded. - **Host Permissions:** Supported streaming-site access enables chat controls. Optional Hugging Face download-host access is requested only when you download the natural engine; narration text is not sent to those hosts. - **Offscreen Processing:** Keeps optional natural speech generation and audio playback separate from streaming pages where supported. - **TTS:** Speaks queued chat and status announcements through the built-in extension speech service, independently from the stream's own audio state. - **Local Processing:** Natural speech is generated locally. Browser voices use the selected browser/device speech engine; an online browser voice may send narration to its speech provider. No narration is sent to Aar318. - **User-Selected Files:** The On-Demand Reader reads only files explicitly chosen through its file picker. When reading resume is enabled, the most recent extracted document and passage are retained in extension-local IndexedDB so the reader can reopen it; disabling resume or pressing Clear removes that saved document. Extraction does not upload files. An online browser voice may transmit the passage being narrated. Scanned documents may require OCR, while DRM-protected e-books are not supported. - **Local Storage Only:** Chat message text is not stored. Username autocomplete and anti-spam history are capped, pruned, and used only for local extension behavior. - **No Tracking:** No analytics, advertising tracking, or external account is required. Privacy policy: https://gist.github.com/aar318/9d4fc167a12546f162bcef3b91322aad **ℹ️ Notes** - Chat reading supports Twitch, Kick, and active YouTube Live pages; the On-Demand Reader can be opened from any page. YouTube begins with newly arriving messages instead of reading the visible backlog. - Browser voice availability depends on the browser/device. Natural voices currently support English; pitch and per-user voice overrides use browser voices. Natural generation uses device memory and processing power. Slow/unavailable engines fall back to browser speech; browser fallback can be online if that is your selected voice.