Issue in SC Voice

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Responding to your request to explain the error shown in the video

As it is, I need to clear site data (something many if not most Internet users may not know how to do) in order to navigate to a sutta in sc-voice that is different from the sutta I navigated to previously. In the video, the issue is perhaps most clear around the one minute mark. Though I clicked to view the sc voice for MN 4, a window popped open where I can view only MN 6 (which was opened previously) and not MN 4 even though I just clicked to view it. Just tested in safari as well, and it replicates there as well. A user is then unable to view any sutta in sc-voice aside from what they previously viewed, until they clear site data. I apologize for any ways that might explanation may have been unclear, and I hope you ask more clarifying questions if it is still unclear to you, as it is a real shame if users are discouraged from using sc-voice which is otherwise very well executed.

Thanks for looking into it!

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Could you repost the link to the video?

Calling Ven. @sabbamitta and @karl_lew

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Hi SatiBen,

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Regards,
Alexandra (on behalf of the moderators)

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Thank you for contacting us! I am glad to hear that you are enjoying SC-Voice. I am not sure however I understand the problem you are trying to describe. As Ven. @Snowbird suggested already, please let us know which video you are talking of.

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This is regarding the bug report here:

https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/feedback-on-your-post-in-suttacentral-bug-reports/41663

as well as the previous message I sent to moderators regarding the same.

If, in SC voice, I had clicked on the search icon on the top of the page and had understood that even though it was not as visually obvious as it is on the main sutta central site (the top of the page there transforms into a search field) I am still able to search not just this sutta but all suttas, then I would perhaps had been more clear, less anxious or confusing, when sending my previous message or seeking to describe the bug. The bug I describe does indeed exist (today same as previous days), and indeed may confuse certain users who happen to enter a state of rigidity of mind such as I entered. However, knowing that it is possible to open various suttas from within sc-voice app, I understand that it is much more minor of a bug that I was previously believing it to be.

Or perhaps it is not a bug proper, but a bit of unexpected behavior or usability gap. The first time we click on the “voice” link / button on the view of a sutta in sutta central, we are taken to the sc-voice page for that sutta. Subsequently, unless we clear site data for sc-voice, when we click on the “voice” link / button for another sutta, while we are taken to sc-voice, the sc-voice page shows only previously opened suttas and not the expected sutta.

Much cause for contemplation here for me, as a software engineer, software user, communicator, and lay practitioner.

If you still are not seeing the bug (even if not a proper bug, just unexpected behavior) I am referring to, or if it does not reproduce for you when you try to open multiple sc-voice suttas via their suttacentral links, then I might be surprised, but please do let me know! (And if, seeing and understanding the bug, you make the determination that fixing it is not worth the effort or risk, I will not be offended)

Thank you for your patience and understanding. Sukhi hotu!

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Both of your posts are now finally merged in this topic, phew. The system wasn’t willing today :slight_smile:

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From your other post:

Or perhaps it is not a bug proper, but a bit of unexpected behavior or usability gap. The first time we click on the “voice” link / button on the view of a sutta in sutta central, we are taken to the sc-voice page for that sutta. Subsequently, unless we clear site data for sc-voice, when we click on the “voice” link / button for another sutta, while we are taken to sc-voice, the sc-voice page shows only previously opened suttas and not the expected sutta.

Okay, with this description I may perhaps understand better what you mean; thanks for that.

The behavior of SC-Voice is indeed different from that of SuttaCentral, and probably of most other websites you are used to. SuttaCentral and SC-Voice are basically different applications serving different user needs.

While SuttaCentral is a very comprehensive website that collects many different kinds of information in one place, SC-Voice has been primarily designed for visually disabled users or others who tend to be overwhelmed by SuttaCentral’s complexity.

Another feature of SC-Voice is that it has been built for comparative study of suttas. That means, the idea is that you open different suttas at the same time and jump between them to compare them. For this purpose, SC-Voice is organized in cards of which you can open several at the same time (for example search cards, sutta cards).

Because of this, unless you close them, SC-Voice will show you your previously viewed cards next time you open it. But the card of the new sutta you want to read should also be visible. Perhaps you have accumulated so many open cards that you can’t find the latest among them. At the top left side of your screen you should see all your open cards, like:

Screenshot from 2025-11-25 16-54-23

Click on the one you want to read now, and it will come into the focus of your screen.

So it is recommended to close cards you don’t need any more. Or, if you still want to keep them open, but just now don’t want them to disturb the reading experience on your screen, you can also minimize them with the “-” next to the “x” at the top right corner of the card. Then you still find it in the overview menue at the top left of your screen. It is not required to clear the site data for that.

SC-Voice also has a “wiki” section where things like this are explained.

I hope this helps.

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Thank you all for the intense discussion. :thinking:

As Ayya @sabbamitta mentions, scVoice does keep track of multiple suttas for comparison. Some people do prefer to look freshly at a single sutta. For those people, the incognito approach may work the best–you get a fresh start. For those who sometimes wish to keep suttas around for perusal, Ayya has explained how to get rid of unwanted sutta cards.

We are currently working on scVoice for Apple mobile offline listening and reading. The issues that you encountered are very real and pertinent–we’ll explore changes in the new code base.

:pray:

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“We are currently working on scVoice for Apple mobile offline listening and reading. The issues that you encountered are very real and pertinent–we’ll explore changes in the new code base.”

I very much appreciate the acknowledgement and now feel I have sufficiently communicated the issue and that my observation has been duly noted / received by the technical members of the team

:folded_hands:

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I realize that the web Voice is not in current production, but one thing that would make the interface more intuitive to me would be X buttons on each tab to close them. I realize it takes up space, but even just putting it on the active tab would be helpful.

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Thank you for the video, @SatiBen, that’s very helpful! This is indeed strange!

Some testing now shows:

  • With Firefox, SC-Voice shows absolutely the expected behavior.
  • But with Chrome, I don’t even get any sutta when clicking the speaker icon in SC, not to mention the expected one. The only thing I get to see is a wiki card, probably the last one I looked at when I last had opened SC-Voice in Chrome; I don’t remember, as I usually open SC-Voice in Firefox.
  • The same thing happens with Dhammaregen when I click the speaker icon in a DE translation on SuttaCentral. The URL line shows the correct URL, but what I get to see is something different.
  • So this is a browser related problem, as it seems.

(I am on Ubuntu 20.04, and always have the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox.)

Hmm … I remember SC-Voice used to work well with Chrome in the past. Chrome is bringing up very frequent updates, perhaps one of their changes has led to this change in behavior? Just speculating …

@karl_lew , any chance to fix that some time soon?

I agree this would be a good thing to have. The space problem is most relevant with phones, but perhaps one “x” in that row of tabs could be possible? @karl_lew ?

P.S. I couldn’t reproduce the issue yesterday because it didn’t occur to me to test it in Chrome. Only when seeing your video I understood that this is what you were using.

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At one time we had “X” on the tab. But then on the phone we could not see enough tabs. :see_no_evil_monkey: So we put the “X” on the card, which created other problems of “how do I get to the X”. It is a maddeningly bad design for phone. In contrast, for the iOS scVoice app, we simply swipe left on the tab per standard Apple gesture. It is so much easier to use than the web scVoice.

I also find that closing tabs is horribly difficult with multiple documents open. Even getting to an X on a card is arduous. :snail:

My own solutions are to: 1) clear the settings (which deletes all tabs), or 2) use incognito. it is also possible to clear the locally stored data using the browser itself. This is a HORRIBLE hack.

scVoice.net is designed for web as broadest access. Unfortunately scVoice.net does not meet my own accessibility needs. I cannot talk to it. I cannot say “close current card”. But on MacOS, I can do these things because of all the kind people at Apple who created Voice Control and Voice Over for accessibility. Soon I will not be able to see the X on anything.

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Indeed thanks for the video. Yes, scVoice.net should work as you expect and take you to the sutta via the button on top. But it doesn’t on Chrome. Or on Safari. :cry:

@Satiben Oddly I rarely use the SC→Voice link. it’s easier for me to navigate around the suttas using scVoice search, which automatically searches for translations by the language and author defined in settings. The Tripitaka organization is too big for my brain and I actually get lost in SC, which is humoungous.

I did find that if I go to the Chrome navigation field at the top of the browser and click there for focus and press ENTER, then the correct sutta shows up. The fact that different browsers behave differently on the same, seemingly simple task underscores just how nasty coding this feature gets. it’s just a URL!

Yes. This is horribly embarrassing. For scVoice.net our priorities are quite stark. The server code is stuck on an older version of NodeJS and we are having trouble moving it forward to the newer releases of Ubuntu/Node. This is a bit terrifying since we are slipping out of the maintenance window. So our current priorities are to keep scVoice.net and its affiliate websites (e.g., Dhammaregen) alive on the proper Ubuntu/Node release. This takes priority over the URL fix, sadly.

If there are Javscript developers out there who are inspired to debug and fix this issue, please do let us know. We would be grateful for a pull request to address these issues.. :pray:

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Here’s my two cents regarding the NodeJS update needed I have a few questions for any JS devs who might be interested in helping who are worth their salt would probably want to know:

  • Do you happen to know how robust your test suite is? A test suite or automated test suite is a collection of scripts or programs that automatically run tests to verify that software works correctly, without requiring manual intervention. The more robust a test suite, the less risk (and ultimately less work) is involved in making changes or in moving to new versions of underlying dependencies.
  • Especially in cases where there is a less than robust test suite, the next questions are: 1) how available are the developers who originally implemented the code? 2) How well documented is app functionality for the purposes of manual testing or (in cases where you would like to avoid or lessen the labor of manual testing) writing new automated tests.

There might be developers who say they can perform major updates without bugs, and depending on seniority or experience with specific tech, they can exercise various degrees of foresight when moving a version forward.

If you’d like someone to take a look at your NodeJS app and maybe just estimate the amount of hours that it would take to migrate to the latest version, I would be happy to do so.

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The back and front end are both in JS. The front end is using Vuetify 3. The back end uses nodejs. The non-UI test coverage is pretty good. The UI coverage is sparse and it would not have helped anyhow with the painful Vue2→ Vue3 conversion. The various repos all use mocha.

* the ebt-vue3 front end has tests for code such as Markdown generation, etc.
* the api_sc-voice_net REST back end has extensive tests.

My own situation is simple. My vision is slowly declining from multiple causes (macular hole, progressive miopia 20+diopters, cataracts) so coding is difficult. Claude has been VERY helpful for the new app and I would recommend Claude Code for tackling any unfamiliar codebase. I gave up on Cursor and was annoyed by Zencoder.

@Satiben, feel free to fork the repos and play as you wish. If you wish to work more closely with us just give us your git username and we can add you as a contributor. So take a look, ask questions and let us know how you’d like to work with us. Also, if you’d like to tackle the Android scVoice, that might be fun as well.

Thank you,
:folded_hands: Karl

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Hey Karl, my github username is bendelonlee. What’s the best way to reach you? Email or Whatsapp? Maybe we could do some driver navigator. I’d be happy to learn more context.

I’m also a big fan of claude-code.

The Readme says “The unit tests require AWS Polly”. This might imply that the unit tests make live calls to AWS while running, using credits. I guess that would be okay? It would be unexpected. Usually something like Nock, which can record HTTPS requests and replay them, is used. In any case, while I’m seeing AWS Tts failures, I also see failures such as in sutta-store functionality that seem to be unrelated to the missing AWS credentials. And the test run repeatedly hangs unfortunately (though I believe this would resolve if I entered proper credentials). Fixing failing tests is something claude-code could certainly help me with, but, especially in the case of the tests failing that don’t seem related to missing credentials, it would feel better to talk to a human dev

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Cool. I’ve added you as a member of sc-voice organisation. Our AWS costs are minimal. I think last month it was about 1USD. The code stores audio on S3 and caches it on server as well as on user computer to minimise costs. Out of respect for SuttaCentral wish to be AI-free, we should move our conversation to WhatsApp. Ayya @sabbamitta will know particulars. I’m somewhat fumbly with communication and social media.

The development is spread across multiple repositories that need to be consolidated into a coherent NX repo so that we can easily maintain the project and complete the transition to ESM in all repos. I see from your Github account that you are using React. I ended up in the Vue universe and SuttaCentral itself is in a different Web UI space altogether. With Claude at our side, I am much less concerned about what technology we use since Claude is great at explaining. I splashed into Swiftie land with ease using Claude and am able to have tech talks with my daughter, who programs in Swiftie land. Claude eases work across frameworks.

Unfortunately, my mom broke both her hips this year, so I’ve been taking care of her and slowly remodelling her house so that we can afford to shelter her well. It’s been a busy year. Thank you very much for offering to help. We are grateful for new company and helping hands.

May all sentient beings hear the suttas with ease.

:folded_hands:

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