Brent A. Thomas
GrapheneOSThe first public release of GrapheneOS Speech Services is now available in our App Store. After installing it, it can be activated as a text-to-speech service by tapping it in Settings > System > Language & region > Speech > Text-to-speech output > Preferred engine and approving it in the dialog.
It currently has a single voice for US English. If you have the system language set to anything other than English (United States), then you need to change Settings > System > Language & region > Speech > Text-to-speech output > Language to English (United States) from Use system language for now.
Once it's bundled with the OS, it will be enabled by default so activating it won't be necessary. Needing to activate the TTS engine causes a lot of confusion since Android's standard user interface shows the first TTS engine as active if none is active due to assuming one is bundled.
Our Speech Services app uses a fully open source model for text-to-speech which we created ourselves using existing open source code and data. We'll be able to train a better model to replace this one now that we have an RTX 5090 for this purpose. We also plan to make voices for other languages too.
The second most used language by GrapheneOS users is very likely German and then likely French. UK English would likely be much easier to add than those due to shared code and data sources so we may do that first but German will likely be next if we can find high quality open data to use for it.
In the short term, we could alias all of the other English variants to US English to have it working by default with those selected as system languages. We don't really want to train more than US and UK voices in the mid term rather than adding other languages so we'll just alias those to US or UK.
We also plan to make our own speech-to-text implementation to go along with the text-to-speech implementation. The models end up very large so it's unclear if we want to bundle more than US English with the OS. The other languages could be available as extra language packs in App Store instead.
Patric@GrapheneOS
I'm looking forward to having speech-to-text included.
Not sure if I will give text-to-speech a try since I never used that on a phone.
But I believe this will be very important for many people.
I'm looking forward to having speech-to-text included.
Not sure if I will give text-to-speech a try since I never used that on a phone.
But I believe this will be very important for many people.
$tefan@GrapheneOS THANK you so much! Download a German Language will make me happy, but the english version for the first steps are pretty enough for me. Thank you again GrapheneOS Team!
Владимир@GrapheneOS Please tell me, is the built-in radio module isolated in graphenos?
MichaelAwesome!
Pedro J. Hdez@GrapheneOS At the risk of sounding like Wikipedia, let me say that Spanish is the third spoken lenguage in the World after English and Chinese and about 6-7 times more spoken than German and French.
¡Gracias por el gran trabajo! ;)
benzogaga33 
@ecosdelfuturo @GrapheneOS "The second most used language by GrapheneOS users "
But i hope spanish people will massive use grapheneOS ;+)
But i hope spanish people will massive use grapheneOS ;+)
@benzogaga33 @GrapheneOS I think that's how I understood it. But it seemed unlikely to me, given the number of Spanish speakers. I'm not sure how the developers estimate the number of users per language, but it doesn't add up to me at first glance. But I could be wrong, of course.
@ecosdelfuturo @benzogaga33 Based on update downloads and other service usage around 52% of our users are in Europe, 32% in North America, 15% in Asia Pacific and below 1% in the rest of the world including the rest of Asia and South America.
Our users in North America are nearly all in the US and Canada.
Our users in Europe are heavily concentrated in western Europe, particularly Germany.
Around half of our users in Asia Pacific are in Australia with the other half mostly in Japan and India.
@ecosdelfuturo @benzogaga33 The order for the most widely used primary languages for GrapheneOS users may be English, German, French, Spanish and then Japanese. Chinese would be quite low because it's only Taiwan where we have a large number of users who are primarily using Chinese. Mainland China has a nearly entirely separate ecosystem for devices, software and services. GrapheneOS services work in China and we've done special work for supporting that but it's for hardly anyone in practice.
Orca 🌻 | 🎀 | 🪁 | 🏴🏳️⚧️@GrapheneOS @ecosdelfuturo @benzogaga33
Google Pixel isn't officially sold in Mainland China, there's only Pixels sold on secondary market, and (obviously) there won't be warranty.
Also, using high security personal devices (or even just 3rd party aftermarket OSes like LineageOS) are generally frowned upon here, largely because the state's stance on security for personal purpose is largely "you've got nothing to hide if you did nothing wrong (and anything can be wrong in the eye of the gov)" and "surrender your privacy for your protection". There's even some reported cases of WeChat accounts being locked because they're used on LineageOS devices or not in owner profile.
Google Pixel isn't officially sold in Mainland China, there's only Pixels sold on secondary market, and (obviously) there won't be warranty.
Also, using high security personal devices (or even just 3rd party aftermarket OSes like LineageOS) are generally frowned upon here, largely because the state's stance on security for personal purpose is largely "you've got nothing to hide if you did nothing wrong (and anything can be wrong in the eye of the gov)" and "surrender your privacy for your protection". There's even some reported cases of WeChat accounts being locked because they're used on LineageOS devices or not in owner profile.
@GrapheneOS @ecosdelfuturo @benzogaga33
Given these reasons, it's often dissidents or other high security personnels using GOS in Mainland China. So it's also obvious that they would tweak their devices' locale and timezone settings to mask where they actually are, and use at least a VPN to get over censorship.
Given these reasons, it's often dissidents or other high security personnels using GOS in Mainland China. So it's also obvious that they would tweak their devices' locale and timezone settings to mask where they actually are, and use at least a VPN to get over censorship.
malte@GrapheneOS @ecosdelfuturo @benzogaga33 that might be one of those cases where you need to strengthen the plane where there are no bullet-holes, a. k. a. the absence of german tts might be an acceptable hurdle for most (potential) users in germany, while it might be prohibitive in other areas of the world?
but this is also highly academic/speculative thought on my part 
@malte @ecosdelfuturo @benzogaga33 Our current userbase is distributed nearly entirely based on where the supported devices are available and people can afford to buy them. There's not much potential for growth outside of Europe, North America and a subset of the countries in APAC until there are more broadly available and cheaper devices meeting our requirements.
Japan has huge potential for growth already. Pixels are not only sold there but very popular and people can largely afford them too.
@malte @ecosdelfuturo @benzogaga33 Our partnership with Motorola will result in having more broadly available supported devices. However, the initial devices are going to be expensive flagships above the price point for budget Pixels because those are the first which are going to meet all the update and security requirements. It's likely going to help us expand to countries like South Korea and New Zealand where Pixels are quite arbitrarily not sold but where people can afford expensive devices.
@malte @ecosdelfuturo @benzogaga33 The best way to get devices for GrapheneOS for a lower price is buying used devices. That depends on there being a large number of devices sold in the past several years. 10th gen Pixels are the first to launch in Mexico so there isn't a good market for used devices there yet. It will take years of Pixels becoming more popular in Mexico before they can get a several year old budget Pixel for a very low price as people can do in the US, Germany, France, etc.
@malte @ecosdelfuturo @benzogaga33 Motorola can likely start meeting our requirements for budget devices similar to the budget Pixels within a couple years but likely not lower priced devices than that for a while. It's very expensive even licensing the long term support from Qualcomm and the devices using a MediaTek SoC are not getting proper updates or security features regardless of what an OEM will pay. Cost and device availability are the main barriers to usage but it's hard to solve.
@GrapheneOS thank you for the elaboration, and yeah, we're all looking forward to the motorola models! ✨
scheme@GrapheneOS I would be willing to donate my (German) voice for training, but not if there was a chance it made it to the open internet.
I assume that is not an option.
I assume that is not an option.
edanomil@scheme @GrapheneOS
You might be surprised, but there is already an open language model available in German.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorsten-Voice
You might be surprised, but there is already an open language model available in German.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorsten-Voice
Bart Groeneveld@GrapheneOS here is a vote for Dutch!
Jacqueline Dekker@bartavi @GrapheneOS and here another vote for Dutch 😊
@GrapheneOS
Dear GrapheneOS Team, thank you so much for your transparent response and for the fantastic work you're doing with GrapheneOS. The focus on data privacy, security, and openness is more important than ever these days.
Previously offering UK English makes perfect sense if it's technically easier to implement. It's all the more wonderful to hear that German could likely follow. Thank you so much for your tremendous dedication and the high quality of your work.
@GrapheneOS Are you, by any chance, considering to take inputs from the users if they are willing to give their voices as open data?
@GrapheneOS Inb4 the interns get caught playing Cyberpunk on the inference machine.
Okay...okay 
@GrapheneOS When I do this, the "Settings" app crashes on my Pixel 9a. Should I hand in a crash report/log somewhere?
@OK_OK You can email the crash report to [email protected]. In this case we're using our Alpha/Beta testing channel for it so you could also post it as an attachment on our Discord #testing channel or Matrix #testing:grapheneos.org room. It's likely an upstream Android bug triggered by them not properly handling having no default system TTS service which will be resolved in our next OS release through bundling our new one with the OS. We don't plan to fix these upstream bugs due to that.
@OK_OK You can likely just do it again after closing the Settings activity and it will likely work fine.
@GrapheneOS Unfotunately not. Every time I want to set the language to "English (US)", the Settings app crashes.
@OK_OK Can you try rebooting?
@GrapheneOS The same behaviour after reboot.
Phillip Plays@GrapheneOS very cool!!
Chinkhuslen Erdenebileg
roman
nathanaelGrapheneOS (@[email protected])
We also plan to make our own speech-to-text implementation to go along with the text-to-speech implementation. The models are end up very large so it's unclear if we want to bundle more than US English with the OS. The other languages could be available as extra language packs in App Store instead.
@hi Yes, we plan to add speech-to-text too. US English speech-to-text may be higher priority than adding more languages to text-to-speech but we haven't decided yet. We can do both at once since we have more developers now and are in the process of hiring more people.
Vovan@GrapheneOS thank you for your great work, I appreciate everything you do quite a lot
PawelK@GrapheneOS which text to speech engine is Graphene using?
Adam Katz@GrapheneOS this is great work!
One note: the pitch control for this is SUPER sensitive. Go more than a nudge from the default pitch and you get some hilarious voices. Go further and they're quite difficult to understand.
D@GrapheneOS yes! Been checking every release notes waiting for this!
@GrapheneOS I had to reboot after following the TTS setup instructions above in order to be able to test it via the "Play" button, for anyone having the same issue.
@container5573 You should also be able to solve that by closing the Settings activity and reopening it. It's due to an Android limitation.
@GrapheneOS sorry for the silly question, but now that its installed and enabled, where am I able to use it?
@robd It provides an implementation for apps using the OS text-to-speech interface to convert text to audio. It's used for navigation directions, reading a document or web page, etc. GrapheneOS has a built-in screen reader forked from the open source TalkBack app for blind users too.
Having TTS included in the OS will be very useful for having more standard functionality working without needing to install and configure an extra app. It's essential to blind users setting up the OS without help.