SuttaCentral Voice, although being still in its infancy, has meanwhile become a little bit known among the D&D community. Monitoring the sound caches shows us that it seems to be much more used than we, the Voice team, suspected. And it is used in quite different ways than what we suspected.
This now makes us curious to learn more about how people use SC-Voice.
Please give us your feedback here. This can help
to inform future steps of development,
and to help other (new) users in finding out what they can do with SC-Voice. (This thread will be linked to the SC-Voice About / Help page, so people can directly find some information on how others are using SC-Voice.)
I am more than happy to share my way of use of the SC-Voice although it is quite specific so I am not sure if it is useful.
My main purpose is to memorise suttas (either excerpts or the entire suttas) in Pāli with understanding of meaning. For example, I downloaded MN21, cut out some sections (SC 19.12 to SC 21.7), edited the audio file so that each Pāli phrase can be followed by the corresponding translation. For example, the Pāli in SC19.13 is too long for me to remember at once (‘na ceva no cittaṃ vipariṇataṃ bhavissati, na ca pāpikaṃ vācaṃ nicchāressāma hitānukampī ca viharissāma mettacittā na dosantarā.) , so I edited as follows.
‘na ceva no cittaṃ vipariṇataṃ bhavissati,
Our minds will remain unaffected.
na ca pāpikaṃ vācaṃ nicchāressāma
We will blurt out no bad words.
hitānukampī ca viharissāma mettacittā na dosantarā.
We will remain full of compassion, with a heart of love and no secret hate.’
I did similar things to other suttas. I put the edited files into a mp3 player and listen to them repeatedly.
I really appreciate SC-Voice. Thank you very much for developing it.
Bhante @sujato, Kaz’s comment is interesting and unexpectedly resonant. It suggests that finer grained segmentation might be of value. I also struggle with the larger pali verses and simply give up listening after about a line or two of Pali. My scary example is this:
Cuddasa kho panimāni yonipamukhasatasahassāni saṭṭhi ca satāni cha ca satāni pañca ca kammuno satāni pañca ca kammāni tīṇi ca kammāni kamme ca aḍḍhakamme ca dvaṭṭhipaṭipadā dvaṭṭhantarakappā chaḷābhijātiyo aṭṭha purisabhūmiyo ekūnapaññāsa ājīvakasate ekūnapaññāsa paribbājakasate ekūnapaññāsa nāgāvāsasate vīse indriyasate tiṃse nirayasate chattiṃsa rajodhātuyo satta saññīgabbhā satta asaññīgabbhā satta nigaṇṭhigabbhā satta devā satta mānusā satta pisācā satta sarā satta pavuṭā satta pavuṭasatāni satta papātā satta papātasatāni satta supinā satta supinasatāni cullāsīti mahākappino satasahassāni, yāni bāle ca paṇḍite ca sandhāvitvā saṃsaritvā dukkhassantaṃ karissanti.
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.
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.
Occasionally I’ll listen to something from the MN as a bedtime story 
, and just as humans, robots are not always perfect… 
