We use SC Voice in a moving vehicle. Reading text off a screen in a moving vehicle gives me a headache easily, so we listen to Amy.
Mostly I use it for the awesome search box Occasionally I’ll listen to something from the MN as a bedtime story
Amy is awesome, isn’t she?
Hope that makes you sleep well!
Just started using it, an excellent resource!
I use it to help my pronunciation. Would be nice to be able to enter individual words and have them pronounced… It’s a great resource! Metta
Not sure if you mean Pali or English, but this is a resource being developed to help people pronounce the Pali words that are often left untranslated in the text: https://readingfaithfully.org/pali-word-pronunciation-recordings/
If you like to discuss it, best to do so in this thread… https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/recordings-of-pali-proper-names
Here is a site with individual Pāli words pronounced: Pali Pronunciation
Perhaps useful for you
does the Thai pronunciation differ a lot!?
Sure, the Thai and Sri Lankan pronunciations of Pali have various differences. Sri Lankan chanting has more of a musical feel, and to my ear, Sri Lankans pronounce an “a” at the end of a word with more of an “er” sound. I presume the styles are influenced by the native dialects of the speakers. Thai chanting tends to use the Thai tone rules for the syllables (giving high/middle/low tones), which is obviously not original to the Pali.
Aditi’s Pali pronunciation on Voice is perhaps more suited for listeners with no Asian background (i.e. no background that provides already a tradition of Pali pronunciation). It is based on the phonemes of the words as they are and doesn’t have a particular “dialect” bias—ideally. But Aditi is a robot , and just as humans, robots are not always perfect…
For comparison, you can also listen to Bhante Sujato’s pronunciation. Right now his recordings are available for the first Saṁyutta of the Saṁyutta Nikāya up to SN 1.59, as a separate link found under “Other Resources”, “Audio: Bhante Sujato (Pali)”:
Soon (hopefully) it will be possible to select Bhante’s voice as an alternative to Aditi directly in the Voice settings.
Thanks for the replies.
I have found that most other Pāli pronunciation / recorded sites have a limited number of words and are usually based on the stem and don’t include inflectional endings.
As SC Voice seems to be an automated system, I wondered if it would be possible to type in single words or short phrases and have them read out.
I’m sure this would be a help for student of Pāli out there…
I am also sure it would. But I am less sure if Voice would be the best platform for this.
We had been considering to implement a feature that allows to have read out Buddhist texts other than the content of SuttaCentral. But we discarded this thought because the necessary effort seemed too much, and there hadn’t been anyone interested in such a thing so far.
Maybe, @karl_lew, what do you think—should we re-consider this?
Absolutely. Voice knows how to pronounce all the Pali in Bhante Sujato’s translations of SN, KN, MN, DN, AN. Therefore, just search for the Pali word directly. For example, here is Aditi speaking nandi:
Click the little dialog bubble icon shown in the lower left to hear “Nandi” in the context of “Nandiyasutta”. This is how I use Voice to learn Pali. Once we publish Bhante’s Pali audio, this same technique can be used to learn how Bhante Sujato speaks Pali.
Right… the feature is already there actually… !
I think it’s 99% there, although Voice may not have Pali found in the Visuddhimaggha (e.g., Bhaṅga).
I (among others) have suggested that SC have the possibility of pasting in Pali or Chinese to get the hover-over translation: Pali and Chinese lookup by pasting? - #10 by mikenz66
Perhaps, if this in implemented, the text could also be fed into the Voice engine.
Your suggestion is feasible. Anagarika Sabbamitta is the Voice Product Owner. Perhaps you might work together to define this feature?
Thank you for the suggestion. We still have to think about how this can be implemented, but just created an issue to start with.
Thank you so much for this, @Robbie, this is a great addition!
I am linking it to this thread which is linked to the SC-Voice Wiki.
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