How to use text-to-speech (TTS) in Discord

If you are an avid gamer that likes to play team games competitively or have moved into the work-from-home environment, chances are you’ve heard of and even used Discord previously. The app might’ve had a bit of controversy recently regarding the changes made to its logo (spoiler: people didn’t really like it much), but it is indisputably one of the best and most used applications for voice communication and media sharing out there.

One of the main strengths of Discord that made it as hugely popular as it is nowadays is indeed the sheer breadth of functionalities it offers – not only does it allow you to text your friends and colleagues, it allows you to enter voice chats with them, create your own servers and rooms, and customize everything to your taste. The level of control and customization Discord allows is really impressive. One such feature is the text-to-speech functionality, which allows you to type in a sentence that Discord will then promptly readout for you directly to your channel – fancy robotic voice and all. Whether you require such a feature due to its potential to improve communications in cases where language proves to be a barrier, or you simply want to mix things up and lighten up the mood on your server, TTS is available for you and all Discord users equally.

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At this point, you might be wondering how you can take advantage of Discord’s text-to-speech feature yourself. If so, you’re in luck – we’ll go through the steps for using the text-to-speech functionality now.

Fortunately, using Discord’s TTS functionality is rather simple. First, we’ll want to make sure that TTS is enabled in the settings of your Discord client. In order to do this, follow the steps below:

1. Open the Discord client
2. Check the bottom of your Discord client’s window and locate a small gear icon – click it in order to open up settings
3. Under the App Settings header, find the Accessibility section and click on it
   
4. Next to some other great options, such as adjusting colour saturation for sensitive people and controlling the level of motion and animations within Discord, you’ll be able to find the text-to-speech option – scroll down until you see it and make sure that it is checked (the function simply won’t work otherwise)
   

After the playback and usage of the /tts command have been enabled, you’ll be able to use the function at your own leisure.

You might be wondering just how to utilize this feature after enabling it – and, luckily enough, using Discord’s text-to-speech functionality is rather simple. After enabling TTS in settings, all you have to do is enter your channel and type ‘/tts’ (without the quotation marks) in before the sentence you want Discord to read out for you. Let’s go through an example – say we wanted Discord to read out the following sentence: ‘The weather is great today’ – all we’d have to do is type in the following:

‘/tts The weather is great today’ (without the quotation marks)

And then hit the enter key to send the message.

That really is all there is to it – after you type in the sentence following the /tts command and send it to your channel, Discord will politely go ahead and read it out for you. Keep in mind that after you press enter and send the message, it will appear in the channel you sent it to (albeit without the /tts tag).

There is, however, another piece of the text-to-speech feature we should go through. If you ever wanted to have a robotic assistant that reads out Discord notifications (and let’s be honest, who wouldn’t?), you’re in luck. Not only does Discord feature an option that allows you to use TTS for your messages, it also allows users to enable a function that’ll make Discord read all of their notifications using the high-tech robotic voice. Cool, right? Let’s briefly go through the steps you should follow if you want to enable this feature.

1. First, you’ll want to open up the Settings menu in your Discord client, as described in the steps above (click the small gear icon located at the bottom of the client window)
2. Next, navigate to the App Settings header and find the Notifications section underneath
3. Scroll down a bit and you should be able to find the text-to-speech notifications section
4. Make sure to check the option that suits your needs – we’ll describe what each of them does below

When it comes to Discord’s TTS notifications feature, you’ll have three available choices for how you want to utilize it. Here’s a brief description of what each of them does:

For all channels: As the name implies, choosing this setting will allow any channel, across any server, to have messages be read out via TTS, regardless if they use the /tts command or not (keep this in mind!). If you decide to go with this option, do be mindful of the fact that you’ll be listening to Discord’s robotic voice going off quite frequently – especially so if you happen to be a member of many channels/servers. As Discord advises, this option is to be used with a modicum of caution as a result.

For current selected channel: Using this setting will ensure that the current text channel you have selected will always have messages read out via TTS. As such, you’ll be hearing the TTS voice a lot less frequently than if you were to choose the option described above.

Never: Selecting this setting will ensure that you won’t ever hear a single pip out of Discord’s TTS bot (the exception being a situation where you initiate it yourself). While this might make the bot a bit cranky, your ears might thank you for it if you’re being constantly bombarded by TTS messages.

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Another thing to keep in mind when it comes to Discord’s TTS functionality is the fact that Discord doesn’t come with its own voice in the web app. This means that, if you happen to use Discord through your browser, you’ll be hearing the TTS voice of the respective browser you’re using (whether it be Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, or some other browser). There might be an option to customize this voice, depending on the browser you’re using.