Speech generation is unreliable

[andyjdavis]

Works in some browsers, not others. Currently hanyupinyin.js from https://github.com/pffy/javascript-hanyupinyin is used. I emailed them about the lack of neutral tone support and the below was their response.

No, we do not handle a neutral tone. We were quite short-sighted and did not expect to deal with the neutral tone. We also overlooked the possibility of tone sandhi and the nuances it entails. Google Chrome now appears to have a decent TTS engine (https://developer.chrome.com/apps/tts) that speaks Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and few other dialects.

We use it here:

https://github.com/pffy/chrome-chinese-frequency-tts
Here is the extension in Google Chrome Web Store:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chinese-frequency-text-to/dbddkjboonoalnoecfcedkmbmfgagbmb