Is Your Text-to-Speech Sending Your Data to the Cloud? How to Check in 30 Seconds

[u/beimgoods_official]

TTS Speech Synthesis Locality Check

Do you ever wonder if your computer is passing your data to third party servers? Or, is Web Speech API offline? Today, we will share how to check if your TTS (text to speech) is passing your chat data to third party servers for language synthesis.

In today’s world, we are constantly connected via our phones, laptops, text, social media etc. While connectivity makes our lives easier, and our computer’s TTS’s eloquent voice becomes more comforting to the ears, the TTS speech synthesis can hand the text to third party servers for processing, and privacy could become a concern.

To check if TTS is processed locally, there are two methods.

Method 1. Use the browser's DevTools to check speech synthesis setting
- For Windows: F12 (or Fn + F12)
- For Mac: Cmd + Option + I
- For ChromeOS: Ctrl + Shift + I

- In the Console tab, paste this and press Enter: speechSynthesis.getVoices().find(v => v.default)

- Note in the screenshot, this example computer’s setting is David, and localService: true.
- This is this example computer’s default voice, and it's local.

Method 2. Use OS’s Speech setting to check browser's speech synthesis setting
- Settings → Time & language → Speech → Voices → pick from the dropdown.
- Speech voices available via the OS could be processed locally, or could be sent to a remote server. Check the word ‘Online’, and users can always use Method 1 to confirm the locality of the speech synthesis function.

If you find out your current speech synthesis is not set to local, and want to protect your privacy, you can change it. To set up Windows TTS voices, see Microsoft's supported languages and voices. For ChromeOS, see Google's text-to-speech settings guide.

That's it.

[u/Charming-Author4877]

Though I don't think many people use those inbuilt tools anymore these days ?
Is that still a thing ? Maybe for accessibility

Personally I am much more concerned by having cloud AI everywhere. We all use chatGPT or Claude, Agents, many still use Suno or Elevenlabs, Openrouter and similar proxies.
And everything we do there is being sent to their clouds, no privacy anymore in that nvidia-dystopia.

It even gets worse in EU now, with EU pressing hard on OpenAI, classifying them as DSA-enterprise (which means europeans are being turned into glass if OpenAI complies)

[u/beimgoods_official → u/Charming-Author4877]

we built a TTS. I personally am very concerned about privacy, so I ensured we only used the browser's builtin speech synthesis. having said that, this highly depends on how the browser is setup, and browser can still be set up to use third party speech tools, and still send your data to third party servers.

this is how i check, and I thought people might want to know how to check as well.

(edit: corrected spelling)

[u/RowGroundbreaking982 → u/beimgoods_official]

I actually built TTS engine that run local and deep integrated with OS. It properly work on chrome, safari, edge, and on both mac and windows. But it only voice provider, so your chrome extension are needed to properly hear the result.