Obsidian Pronounce 🔊

Add a discreet speaker button next to any word or phrase and hear its exact pronunciation instantly — in any language, on any device. Built for language learners who keep vocabulary tables and want a single click or tap, without emoji-hunting or copy-pasting.

Existing TTS plugins (Apple TTS, Text to Speech, ...) are built to read whole notes aloud for accessibility, and most rely on desktop-only binaries (e.g. macOS's say) that don't work on mobile. Pronounce does the opposite: it's a tiny, per-word 🔊 button built entirely on the standard window.speechSynthesis API, no native binaries. In practice that means it works great on macOS, Windows, Linux, and iOS/iPadOS (see the voice quality note below for iOS); Android is currently unsupported — see Known limitations.

Note on system voices. Pronounce runs 100% locally and offline to protect your privacy — it relies entirely on your device's own speech engine, it never sends text anywhere. To get the most natural-sounding voices (e.g. Alva Enhanced for Swedish, Samantha for English), make sure the voice for your target language is downloaded on your device:

• macOS — System Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → System voice (or the VoiceOver Utility on macOS 15+).
• iOS (iPhone/iPad) — Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices. Note: only the base/Compact tier is actually usable here — see Known limitations.
• Windows — Settings → Time & Language → Speech.

Android isn't listed above because no voice setup will make this work there yet — see Known limitations.

Features

• Inline trigger, no emoji required. Wrap a word in ~ and it turns into a 🔊 button, in both Reading view and Live Preview.
  • ~mot~ → speaker button using the note's current language.
  • ~bonjour:fr~ (or ~bonjour|fr~) → forces French for that one word, regardless of context. Both the short code (sv) and the full BCP-47 code (sv-SE) work — ~sked:sv~ and ~sked:sv-SE~ both call the Swedish voice.
  • Native Markdown ~~strikethrough~~ is never affected — the parser ignores a doubled-up delimiter.
  • The delimiter (~ by default) is a single configurable character in Settings, in case it conflicts with another plugin.
• Quick listen on selection. Highlight any word or phrase, then:
  • Right-click → Listen to pronunciation, or
  • Run the Listen to selection command from the command palette (assign your own hotkey, e.g. Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + S, in Settings → Hotkeys), or
  • On mobile, add it to your toolbar above the keyboard: Settings → Mobile → Manage toolbar options → Add global command → Listen to selection.
• Read a whole vocabulary note in one pass. Run Read marked words in note to have every ~word~ in the open note read aloud top to bottom, with a short pause between each — a quick listening review of a whole table without clicking every button. Run the command again to stop partway through.
• Slow down on repeat, Google Translate-style. Say the same word or phrase again right after the first play — whether from the same 🔊 button, a different button for that same text elsewhere in the note, or the Listen to selection command — and it speaks at a separately configurable slow rate so you can pick apart each syllable. Say it again to go back to normal speed. It's a strict toggle keyed on the text itself (not a timer, and not tied to a specific button), so repeating the exact same word/phrase anywhere always alternates Normal → Slow → Normal.
• Language switcher in the status bar. A small badge (e.g. 🇸🇪 SV) shows the language currently active for the open note. Click it — or run Pronounce: Switch language from the command palette — for an instant picker. When nothing has been forced (no manual pick, no frontmatter lang), the badge reads 🏳️ Auto instead. Picking 🏳️ Auto at the top of that menu clears any manual override for the note, handing control back to its frontmatter or the plugin default.
• Strict, predictable language cascade. No guessing which language will be used:
  1. Language forced inline on the word (~word:en~).
  2. Manual pick from the status bar / command palette (active for that note, for the rest of the session).
  3. The note's frontmatter:

     ---
     lang: sv-SE
     ---
     

  4. The plugin's default language, set in Settings.
• 100% cross-platform. Built exclusively on the standard window.speechSynthesis (Web Speech API) — no child_process, no system binaries. Same code path on desktop and mobile, works fully offline with on-device voices, and never sends your text anywhere.

Settings

• Default language — used when nothing else in the cascade applies.
• Voice — pick a specific system voice for the default language (e.g. Alva Enhanced on macOS for Swedish). Voices are ranked automatically so Apple's Premium/Enhanced tiers and the OS's own default voice are offered first, and legacy novelty voices (Albert, Zarvox, ...) are pushed to the bottom and labeled [Novelty]. Download higher-quality voices from System Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content (VoiceOver on macOS 15+) to get more/better options here.
• Normal speech rate — 0.5x–1.1x (defaults to 0.85x), used on the first click.
• Slow speech rate — 0.2x–0.8x (defaults to 0.4x), used on repeat clicks on the same word (the Google Translate-style slow-motion toggle). Both are independent sliders, so you can tune how slow "slow" actually is.
• Pitch — 0.8x–1.2x.
• Show in context menu — toggle the right-click Listen to pronunciation entry.
• Inline delimiter — the single character wrapping a word (default ~).

Installation

From the Community Plugins browser (once published)

1. Settings → Community plugins → Browse.
2. Search for Pronounce.
3. Install, then enable it.

Manual install

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Copy them into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/pronounce/.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable Pronounce in Settings → Community plugins.

BRAT (beta testing)

Add LouisVct/obsidian-pronounce in the BRAT plugin.

Known limitations

• Android doesn't work at all, and this can't be fixed from a plugin. window.speechSynthesis simply doesn't exist in the Android WebView that Obsidian's mobile app is built on (Obsidian uses Capacitor, which embeds Android's system WebView, not Chrome) — it's a Chromium bug open since May 2015 with no fix in sight, confirmed on Obsidian's own forum: a moderator explicitly declined it as a third-party/upstream issue outside Obsidian's control. Every Web Speech API-based plugin hits this, not just Pronounce. isDesktopOnly is still false because the plugin's own code has no desktop-only dependency and fails gracefully (a console warning, not a crash) — it's the platform, not the plugin, that's the gap.
• On iOS/iPadOS, downloaded Enhanced/Premium voices are never reachable — only the Compact/pre-installed tier is. This is a platform limitation, not a bug in this plugin: WKWebView's implementation of the Web Speech API only exposes Compact voices, even when a higher-quality voice for that language has been downloaded and selected in Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content. The only way around it is native AVSpeechSynthesizer access, unavailable to a web-based Obsidian plugin. Desktop platforms (macOS, Windows, Linux) aren't affected — Enhanced/Premium/Natural voices there are correctly detected and preferred.
• Voice availability and quality otherwise depend entirely on what's installed on the underlying OS/browser; the plugin can't bundle or download voices itself. If a language sounds robotic or doesn't speak at all, download that language's voice in your OS's accessibility settings — see the note on system voices above.

Development

npm install
npm run dev    # esbuild in watch mode
npm run build  # type-check + production build

Symlink or copy the repo into a test vault's .obsidian/plugins/pronounce/ folder to iterate live.

Project layout:

obsidian-pronounce/
├── manifest.json         # Plugin metadata (id, name, version, isDesktopOnly: false)
├── package.json          # Build dependencies (obsidian, typescript, esbuild)
├── tsconfig.json
├── src/
│   ├── main.ts           # Entry point: commands, status bar, language cascade
│   ├── settings.ts       # Settings tab, persistence, language list
│   ├── ttsService.ts     # Wrapper around window.speechSynthesis
│   └── inlineWidget.ts   # Reading-mode processor + Live Preview (CodeMirror 6) widget
└── styles.css            # Speaker button + status bar styling (theme-aware)

License

MIT

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If Pronounce helps your language learning journey, consider buying me a coffee ☕ to support development!

Created by Louis Vicat