Android Player: speechSynthesis / Web Speech API unavailable in WebView (Chromium 138)

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Hi Team,

We’re using a white-label Xibo Android player on an Android 9 TV box.

We upgraded the Android System WebView from 66 to Chromium 138, and confirmed that the player is now using:

Mozilla/5.0 ... Chrome/138.0.7204.179

However, inside the WebView:

typeof window.speechSynthesis
// "undefined"

typeof window.SpeechSynthesisUtterance
// "undefined"

The same webpage works correctly in:

  • Google Chrome (Android, Windows)

  • Xibo Windows Player

but not in the Android player.

Our application uses JavaScript TTS for dynamic queue announcements.

Questions:

  1. Is this a known limitation of the Xibo Android Player or Android WebView?

  2. Does the Android player expose any native TextToSpeech API or JavaScript bridge that webpages can call?

  3. Has anyone successfully implemented dynamic TTS from an embedded webpage on the Android player?

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Aash Gates