Apple shouldn't localize voice names

[HadrienGardeur]

Apple has a very weird take on voice names, where voices are not only localized, but localized inconsistently depending on the number of variants installed and browser used.

A lot of the complexity in this project comes from documenting altNames because of this approach. Localization wouldn't be that big of an issue if voiceURI was used as a true identifier, but that's unfortunately only the case on Firefox.

The following strings can be localized:

• Name (on rare occasions, but still possible)
• Language
• Country (capitalized in some languages, downcased in others)
• Quality

For the quality variants, there's quite a bit of inconsistency across localizations:

Medium quality

• English: Enhanced
• French: premium
• Spanish: mejorada
• Italian: ottimizzata
• Catalan: millorada
• Portuguese: melhorada
• German: erweitert
• Dutch: verbeterd

High quality

• English: Premium
• Spanish/Italian/German/Portuguese/Dutch: premium
• French: de qualité
• Catalan: prèmium

As you can notice while looking at this list, "premium" can either mean:

• medium quality in French
• and high quality in Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese and Dutch (and probably other languages too)

For the different browsers, here's how the localized string is created:

Chrome and Edge

If a single variant is installed:

• Name

If two or more variants are installed:

• Name (Language (Country))

Which means that it's impossible to select between lower and higher quality variants, since they all use the same name and voiceURI.

Safari

• Name

Which means that it's impossible to select between lower and higher quality variants, since they all use the same name and voiceURI.

Firefox and older versions of Chrome/Edge

For the lowest quality voices:

• Name

For the higher quality variants:

• Name (Quality)

Which is less than ideal (due to localization of both name and quality), but is a lot more manageable than other browsers.

Links:

• TBD