Comment on Which selfhosted TTS provider should I use with home assistant?

• sxan@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  The docs don’t say it’s completely offline. Can you turn off your LAN connection and it still works? Have you tried this? Or just firewall off out bound access to Google services?

  This comment:

  Contrary to what the name suggests, the integration only does text-to-speech and does not translate messages sent to it.

  doesn’t say it doesn’t call out to Google services; it says only that it doesn’t use translation services. I didn’t see anything else that implies it doesn’t send data to Google.

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  • just_another_person@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    If it doesn’t require an API key in the config, it’s offline. My HA works totally offline unless I need to do updates, and it’s always worked for me.

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    • sxan@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Yeah, so I dug into it, and it’s definitely not offline. It uses gtts, which ultimately makes calls to google.com for the tts. You can track it down yourself, but you’ll eventually end up here, which talks about how to change the google host name in case it’s blocked.

      I’m not sure why you believe not needing an API key means it isn’t calling a Google API, especially in this case where it clearly states it’s using an unofficial channel - which is the same trick third party YouTube clients use to access YouTube videos without using API keys.

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    • sxan@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      👍 Thanks. I’m surprised, and still skeptical, but thanks.

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      • un_ax@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        I was curious and it uses gTTS.

        It calls what’s probably the “speak” button on translate.google.com

        This project is leveraging the undocumented Google Translate speech functionality

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