This topic is created to capture any feedback and suggestions speakers of Portuguese may have in terms of how to improve the pronunciation of by the text to speech (TTS) service, aka Ricardo.
At this stage the Portuguese TTS service is found at the staging server. For reference, see below link to listen to MN118:
Ah. My ear can’t discern the subtlety of the “e”'s. Here is another attempt:
<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="'es.sta.se"/>
And an update for arahant:
<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="'aɾaɾɾante"/>
That link you posted uses the same Ricardo (i.e., AWS). Therefore, you should be able to play and use the exact phonemes given here. I tested it with the above. Glad you found the site. It makes our job much easier!
Yes, we’re getting there.
I would say êxtase now sounds good.
For arahant it is not sound like what I get when I use the website to pronounce it spelt like ararrante. Can you just adjust the code to read arahant as ararrante whenever it finds it in the text?
Now I understand. From the list of vowels found in the link I would say they did not code Ricardo to pronounce the peculiar ê, it only has e , ẽ and ɛ.
In addition, for arahant, we can get back the Portuguese “ch” by removing the ending IPA “e”. This sounds odd to me but perhaps the Portuguese listeners will see the “t” when hearing the “tch”:
<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="'aɾaɾɾant"/>
The primary goal is semantic fidelity–can the suttas be understood without ambiguity.
Here is another try. Unfortunately, we currently need to use IPA. The “sounds like” isn’t supported by Voice:
<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="'a.ɾa.han.t͡ʃĩ"/>
I do have a question about pronunciation of foreign words. The word arahant is a Pali word. Should we pronounce and spell Pali as much like Pali as possible? It’s not clear what our translation policy should be.
Here is Aditi speaking arahant directly. Note that it sounds quite different than ararrante:
I will wait until it is released and found available in https://voice.suttacentral.net to share it in other online forums and invite for others to check it and provide their feedback here.
Gabriel, I’ve sent gnlaera a Github invitation to join sc-voice. This should allow you to participate freely in issues relating to sc-voice. You’ll also be given full access to source code so that you can make changes directly as you see fit. Please coordinate your changes with the team to minimize merge conflicts (i.e., two people editing same file).
Anagarika, if Gabriel approves #187, we are ready for release pending your approval. All automated tests pass for v1.8.7.
Gabriel, Anagarika Sabbamitta is the Voice Product Owner (PO). She directs and approves Voice features and releases.
I have just replied with a comment saying I approve it. I could not find a button to close it.
Sorry but I have no idea of how this GitHub thing works! haha