frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Why are websites trying to talk at me?

1•LeratoAustini•1h ago
Why am I seeing this on so many sites recently (in FireFox)? I've seen it half a dozen times in the past month or so, had never noticed it before then.

"You can't use speech synthesis because the speech dispatcher library is missing"

There's a 'learn more' link, but it just talks about getting speech synthesis working in my browser. Searching for the error string returns similar discussions. I don't want to do that (especially if it's some new marketing fad). Obviously it's speech synthesis but *what is it saying?*

The most recent instance was a dell.com product page posted here on HN:

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-ultrasharp-52-thunderbolt-hub-monitor-u5226kw/apd/210-bthw/monitors-monitor-accessories

As lots of people on HN will have visited that link I thought somebody might be able to tell me what they heard?

Comments

serf•1h ago
a lot of that may be TTS accessibility features.

I know Ubuntu, among others, used to ship Firefox without modules it defaulted into, so it would complain harmlessly and bring up an annoying pop-up-blocked style modal when the TTS module/engine was missing.

(they may still do this, but i'm not up to date.)

LeratoAustini•59m ago
Oh so maybe they are just initialising the TTS by default, ready for those who need it for accessibility? That would make sense.

I'm on a Debian, so that ties in with what you mentioned.

It's easy to get rid of the error, I was more just curious. Thought maybe mainstream websites had started blasting speech at users as soon as they arrived.

fuzzfactor•1h ago
Maybe nobody else was listening?
supernes•36m ago
I examined that Dell link and speech synthesis is used in the "Virtual Assistant" on-page chat widget. There's a feature check to see if it's available so it shouldn't trigger the way it does for you, that may be a browser issue.

We need to back 'patriotic' winners to build the UK's first £1T tech giant

https://www.thetimes.com/sunday-times-100-tech/tech-feature/article/ian-hogarth-interview-ai-tech...
2•colesantiago•2m ago•0 comments

Erdõs Problem #281

https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/281
1•gone35•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Nosi – where AI publishes to the open web (human page and /raw text)

https://nosi.pub/260621
1•billhao•8m ago•1 comments

Prime-C-19 – Replacing Attention with a Physics Pilot on a Riemann Manifold

https://github.com/Kenessy/PRIME-C-19
1•DanielKenessy•11m ago•1 comments

Brand Safety Has Moved Upstream of Media

https://www.aivojournal.org/brand-safety-has-moved-upstream-of-media/
1•businessmate•12m ago•1 comments

Show HN: I built a list of student developer benefits beyond the GitHub Pack

https://resourify.com
1•faceline•13m ago•0 comments

A Social Filesystem

https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/
1•icy•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: WebTerm – Browser-based terminal emulator

https://www.webterm.app/en
1•DaiAoki•21m ago•1 comments

Built a Skills Database from Lenny's Podcast Episodes

https://sidbharath.com/blog/building-lenny-skills-database/
1•mikasisiki•27m ago•0 comments

Oilwell: Wellness app to help you embrace climate chaos

https://oilwell.app/
1•47282847•30m ago•0 comments

Cutting LLM token Usage by ~80% using REPL driven document analysis

https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-01-16-lattice-mcp.html
3•birdculture•34m ago•1 comments

Indirection

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indirection
2•tosh•38m ago•0 comments

Therac-25 Providing radiation therapy to cancer patients, Therac-25 malfunctiond

https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/case-study/therac-25
3•ncb9094•38m ago•1 comments

Hypnosis with Aphantasia

https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/hypnosis-with-aphantasia
2•danhite•40m ago•1 comments

You may just be renting your car even if you have a loan

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/01/17/7-year-car-loan-affordability-underwater/
4•_tk_•41m ago•0 comments

The Layers of the Web [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll1e8cYx3do
1•DavidPiper•45m ago•0 comments

Demystifying Evals for AI Agents

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/demystifying-evals-for-ai-agents
1•handfuloflight•45m ago•0 comments

Tribute to Roko's basilisk: How to write gen AI systems

https://lorentz.app/blog-item.html?id=writing-ai-systems-2026
1•baalimago•53m ago•0 comments

Holographik: Typography Inspiration – December 2025

https://medium.com/holographik/typography-inspiration-december-2025-da800922b4c5
2•handfuloflight•54m ago•0 comments

Bigocheck: Empirical complexity analysis for Python (Zero Ops)

https://github.com/adwantg/bigocheck
1•gadwant•54m ago•1 comments

Best approach for generating SVG graphics with LLMs?

2•huly11•1h ago•0 comments

From Code Foundation Models to Agents and Applications

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18538
1•tamnd•1h ago•0 comments

The Web's Grain (2015)

https://frankchimero.com/blog/2015/the-webs-grain/
1•tosh•1h ago•0 comments

The Discourse Is a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-discourse-is-a-distributed-denial-of-service-attack/
1•tardibear•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Qrystal Uplink – External watchdog for IoT fleets, setup in <5 mins

https://uplink.qrystal.partners/api/auth/polar/webhooks
1•mikayelgr•1h ago•0 comments

Beyond the Machine

https://frankchimero.com/blog/2025/beyond-the-machine/
1•tosh•1h ago•0 comments

New York City is being recreated at 1:1 scale inside Minecraft

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/new-york-city-recreated-at-1-1-scale-inside-mi...
5•NewCzech•1h ago•1 comments

Image-to-text working out of the box

https://github.com/rene-ajm-veerman/nicerApp-WebOS-5.10.z/blob/main/NicerAppWebOS/scripts.mainten...
1•rene-veerman•1h ago•2 comments

Friend's Guide to Agentic Engineering

https://abrown.blog/posts/a-friends-guide-to-agentic-engineering/
3•AWebOfBrown•1h ago•0 comments

Intelsat 708 02-15-1996 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZTFgZ9zl74
1•schmuckonwheels•1h ago•0 comments