How to: Discord Text to Speech

Rashida Beal
Jan 4, 2023

Discord is an app that’s quickly rising in popularity for streamers, gamers, and others who enjoy large-group conversations. The instant-messaging platform now has 150 million monthly active users, more than triple the users it had in 2019.

The platform helps many creators with their streaming, gaming, or other chat functions. Since it’s free to download and available on many different devices, it’s an incredibly accessible platform.

Furthermore, Discord includes several accessibility features, like text-to-speech messages.

Keep reading to learn more about using Discord text-to-speech.

What is Text-to-Speech?

Text-to-speech is an AI-powered technology that turns text into audio. This tech solution takes words on a screen and “reads” them via an AI voice.

The purpose is to help people communicate more effectively. Those with vision impairments greatly benefit from this feature, as it allows them to stay engaged with written conversations.

Many other people also enjoy text-to-speech for smoother interactions, regardless of native language or reading abilities.

Discord Text-to-Speech

Discord conveniently offers a text-to-speech feature right on its application. Users can activate the feature to interact easier with viewers during a lifestream or gaming session. When TTS is on, the platform will read aloud the typed messages. This is faster and easier than sending a voice message separately.

The one downfall is that the feature is only available for desktops, you cannot access it on mobile. Right now, it only works on Mac and Windows desktop app.

Enabling The Feature

Enabling Discord text-to-speech is a quick process. Here are the steps:

Open Discord
Locate the Discord user setting menu (gear icon)
Under “App Settings”, find “Text & Images”
Select “Allow playback and usage of TTS command”. Enable this function.

Now, the app is prepared for TTS messages. This means that it will automatically change any text into an audio message when you send the message/

To ensure the feature works properly, you can type a forward slash and then type “tts” with a message on a private server. Discord should play the text as a voice message. If this works correctly and you can hear your message, then the feature is activated and in sync. Moving forward, you should be able to read messages and hear them together.

Activate Text-to-Speech Notifications

Another helpful way to use the text-to-speech feature on discord is for notifications. When this feature is activated, Discord will reach any notification messages out loud without the need to click notifications.

Head to the user setting menu on the app. Then, under “App Settings”, locate “Notifications.” Find “Text to Speech Notifications” under the settings. Then you will see three options:

All Channels

Enabling this option will have Discord read all of the notifications out loud. This will happen whether or not the message has a TTs tag. If you are in the middle of something, like a game session, then this can be very helpful.

For the Current Channel

Toggling this setting on enables TTS notifications only for the channel you are on (the selected channel). If you are chatting on several channels but want to prioritize one, this feature is ideal.

Never

The default setting is to never read the notifications out loud. If you previously enabled them but want to turn TTS notifications off, then you click this button.

How to Enable Text-to-Speech for Discord Chats

To allow TTS for Discord chats, you must include the “/tts” tag after the message. When you do this, then anyone else in the channel will be able to hear the converted message if they have the TTS feature on. The Discord AI voice reads out the words from the message as well as the username. There are multiple custom voices to choose from if you use third-party software.

Mute TTS on Discord

If the TTS feature is on and you do not want it to be, then you can mute the messages. Muting all text-to-speech is easy on Discord.

Head to “Settings”
Under “App Settings”, select “Text & Images”
Scroll down to “Text to Speech”
Unselect “Allow playback and Usage of TTS command”

If you are not a channel admin, you can still mute TTS for yourself.

Conclusion

Now you know about the Discord text-to-speech feature, including how to enable and disable it. It’s a helpful feature that improves accessibility and multi-tasking on the app.

While Maestra does not currently have a text-to-speech feature that works on Discord, we are leaders in both speech-to-text and text-to-speech solutions. Using our video dubbing feature, for example, you can convert video transcripts into AI-powered voiceovers in over 30 languages. Quickly and easily add voiceovers in several languages to your videos to improve their accessibility and reach a wider audience, all without the need for hiring professional voice actors.

With our software solution, you can add natural-sounding voiceovers and dubbing to your video content. Our cost-effective service allows you to enhance the quality and reach of your videos in no time.

Learn more about Maestra and our automatic transcripts, subtitles, and voiceovers today. Easily upload files now to see Maestra's transcription tool in action or request your free demo today!