Is there a way to listen to the Sutta voiceovers without the narration of pali words?

Is there a way to listen to the Sutta voiceovers without the narration of pali words? Would be very useful if so.

1 Like

You have to activate the settings.

Then uncheck “Show Pali text”

image

5 Likes

It too me a while to figure out the interface. I assume that Voice was conceived with the idea that anything that is shown as “text” is also spoken. Clearly, for someone who has impaired sight this would make sense, however, there are situations where one would like to see both original and translated text, but only hear the original. This is what many of us do when chanting suttas - we speak the Pali, but have the English there, so that we can follow the meaning.

If it’s not too difficult, separating the “show” from the “speak” would give the system much more flexibility, in my opinion.

2 Likes

Always great to hear that Voice is also interesting for the sighted!

It certainly would, but as for most things, there are two sides to it.

More options to choose from means more settings, more settings means a more complex app, and a more complex app means it is less easy to use for assisted users.

But yes, we will consider your suggestion for the new version of Voice and see what we can do. It will however take a long while before this can be ready. Voice is currently undergoing a major revision, and it still takes time. So be patient! :pray:

2 Likes

So … here it is!

We can’t make any changes to Voice any more, but I just discussed with @karl_lew that it is perhaps time to share a bit of our new work now. It’s not a finished app, it doesn’t even have a proper name yet. We call it “EBT-Vue3”—it’s a website prototype sitting in our website workshop. So there will still be a lot of change and development, and by far not everything is working yet. But if someone is interested to try it out, here it is:

https://ebt-site.github.io/ebt-vue3

Karl just added an option for selecting what is shown and what is played separately in the settings. Go to “layout” to select what you want to see, and to “audio” to select what you want to hear. The default setting is bilingual in both places.

Any feedback would be most welcome!

And … MERRY CHRISTMAS from the Voice team!

:christmas_tree: :star2: :heart:

3 Likes

Thank you, Ayya.

The two new settings offer different combinations. For example, reading English while hearing Pali may help build comprehension. Ayya Sabbamitta points out that this technique is often used in learning foreign languages, which I found fascinating.

And thank you all for helping us make Voice more helpful. With EBT-Vue3 we’re exploring the phone use case more. We have tested both Android and IPhone with Chrome and Firefox. Newer phones with large memory storage will work best–we’d like to store as much audio and text on the phone as possible.

The technology used by the existing Voice application is no longer supported, and that has forced us to rewrite and retest much of the code. That rewrite afforded us a chance to explore some new approaches. Hopefully the new user interface will be of value. If you miss anything from Voice while using Ebt-Vue3, please do let us know–we may have inadvertently missed some key use cases.

3 Likes

Thanks! To me that is much clearer, and is much more useful in a variety of contexts.

Have a great holiday!

3 Likes