SC Voice: "Not" word should not be pronounced by speaker in AN1.2:1.1

In “2 of 11 (2m 8s)” sections of AN1.1:2.2 part (SuttaCentral Voice) mentions:

Pali language: Itthirūpaṃ, bhikkhave, purisassa cittaṃ pariyādāya tiṭṭhatī”ti.
English language: The sight of a woman occupies a man’s mind.”
However, the speaker says: The sight of a woman NOT occupies a man’s mind.
It happens to the Rūpādi 1-10.

Please help check and update the content of audios.

Thanks,
Best Regard.

P/S: By the way, her voice is good and clear.

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Greetings @dungdoant and welcome to the forum :slight_smile:

Thanks for your feedback for SC Voice
I’ll just tag our resident expert @karl_lew

We hope you enjoy this site, and if you have any questions please feel free to ask, or send a message to the moderators :smiley:

Metta :sunflower:

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Thank you very much for your feedback! And thanks for giving the exact reference AN1.1:2.2, this is very helpful.

Could you tell us with which voice this occurred? I’ve just tested with Amy, and she doesn’t actually say any extra word (“NOT”), but she quite strongly binds the two words “woman” and “occupies” together, like “womannooccupies” or so. Is this what you mean?

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I believe that is what is meant. It is probably a quirk of the TTS, possibly an adjusted mapping of either ‘woman’ or ‘occupies’ will do the trick. Maybe try adding a mute sound which would still force a gap? Maybe ː will work?
Not sure, but this link may be of help: Convert IPA phonetic notation text to speech
:anjal:

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Thanks for your help, Sabbamita.

As to me, that is not a bug. Due to linking sound, she speaks like that.
Your team is doing a great job in this website.

With all my honesty, thank you so much.

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Hi Dungdoant, thanks for your compliments about Voice. :grinning:

We can fix mispronunciations to a certain degree and have already done a lot of such work, especially for Aditi, the Pali voice. We consider it quite important that people hear Pali as properly pronounced as possible so they don’t learn it incorrectly. But as each mispronunciation needs to be addressed individually this is a lot of work, and for translation voices we only do it if it leads to misunderstandings. If it sounds a bit strange but the sense can be understood we usually tolerate the mispronunciation.

In the case you mentioned this might be a bit of a border case, so I’d perhaps leave it up to Karl to decide (he’s the one who does the actual work in this area).

For the (hopefully) near future we are planning some work on pronunciation again, and here you can see the list of items we have at the moment. It’s looong! :grin:

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Hello Sabbamitta,

Thanks for your efforts.
In fact, I often compare Pāli text suttas and English translation. So it is almost mentioned in Pāli.
And about translation voice, that is all right. That is so kind to your team working for Budda, Dhamma, Saṇgha. Once again, your team is doing a great job that all most people are looking for true happiness.

Thank you so much,
Best regards,

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This does indeed sound very peculiar:

By adding a phonetic exception, we can sometimes correct a single word with customWord pronunciation ɒkʊpaɪz

Given the large number of words in use, fixing word pronunciation is fairly labor intensive, so much so that we have had to prioritize fixes:

  • Semantic fixes are highest priority because they lead to misunderstanding the Dhamma
  • Semantic fixes for Pali are given priority over other languages because Pali is the root language
  • Non-semantic fixes will be addressed as time and energy permit. This includes fixes for “non-standard” yet clearly understood phrasing.

As Anagarika mentions, we do plan on addressing pronunciation further this year.

Thank you for your patience listening to Voice and letting us know about mispronunciations. Together we train the AI voices!

:pray:

We do indeed use IPA to correct AI pronunciation. It’s a bit of an art since IPA is not exact and quite open to interpretation. Different speakers will speak an IPA phoneme differently. :see_no_evil: Yet hope remains and AWS Polly offers SSML for us to tweak pronunciation. Amy’s IPA lexicon is limited but serviceable.

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To my ear this sounds good! What does @dungdoant say? In that case I’ll make an issue for that, and we can address it at some point. Thanks very much, @karl_lew.

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You guys are all so great :smiley: :sparkling_heart:

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Hello Karl,

That is amazing!

Thank you

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