SuttaCentral Voice v2.1: integrating Voice more closely to SuttaCentral

sabbamitta · February 22, 2020, 5:27pm

Dear friends, today we have come out with another release of SC-Voice.

Most of the work that has been done this time concerns the operations of the Voice application, things that are happening behind the scenes and do not change much of what is visible for the user.

The main step is that the repositories of Voice and SuttaCentral have been merged, and they have received new folder structures which reflect the three “baskets” sutta, vinaya, and abhidhamma.

Using an image for what has been done: Usually, a surgery for Siamese twins happens in order to separate them. But in this case it was in order to connect them, and at the same time exchange their very bones on both sides. After that, the nervous systems of each one of the twins had to be adapted to connect the new bones and joints so that they can move smoothly. In the case of Voice, this required building new servers both for staging and production—and the wondrous thing happened: Voice is moving and using her new limbs perfectly well now!

From now on, content can be exchanged much more easily between SuttaCentral and Voice, and depending on the update intervals of each one, the same content can be shown in Voice and on SuttaCentral. There may still be differences between what you see on the SC site and what you hear in Voice—this is due to different update intervals. At some times SuttaCentral can be ahead of Voice, and at other times Voice can be ahead of SuttaCentral.

For our German audience, the blurb texts are now no longer shown in English but in German.

(expand the first arrow)

Apart from this we have still fixed a few bugs. Find all release issues here.

For the months to come these are our focuses of development:

We hope you keep enjoying Voice and like to hear your feedback!

karl_lew · February 22, 2020, 5:35pm

With this new release of Voice and integration with bilara-data, Voice will be able to display all upcoming segmented translations of the Vinaya as well as the Abhidhamma as they are published on SuttaCentral itself. As a result, we will probably need to add preferences to Voice Settings that allow users to refine/restrict search results to: sutta, vinaya, and/or abhidhamma (but that’s far in the future!).

Now that the bilara-data integration is complete, Voice will return to normal releases. For example, we’ve noticed that Settings has become cumbersome to use with all the language choices. Aminah has offered some suggestions that we’ll be incorporating in upcoming releases. If you have requests/suggestions, please post here for Anagarika Sabbamitta so that she can prioritize our future work.

ERose · February 28, 2020, 11:29pm

Thank you very much for this work, @sabbamitta , @karl_lew and all else involved!

karl_lew · March 6, 2020, 1:08pm

Voice died today and has now been restarted after over 8 hours transmigrating. It’s last thought was about MN77, trying to download a sound file. We haven’t had time to fill the sound caches with audio, so our little hamster is running very very fast on the wheel trying to generate the words. I suppose it had a heart attack. It’s started a new life. I would expect further crashes until the caches fill up with sounds. Please continue downloading and listening. That’s how we fill the caches.

20200306 04:22:12 I GET download/pli,en/mn77/en/sujato => mn77-en-sujato_pli+en_amy.mp3 size:51930185 secs:6686 35ef9d55587a57ea0912259262ad8de8
Fri Mar 6 04:22:13 UTC 2020 EXIT sc-voice
Fri Mar 6 04:22:13 UTC 2020 STOP sc-voice service

sabbamitta · March 6, 2020, 2:00pm

Thanks to Yama, the god of the death, to show Voice the way to her new life!

AdrianMagno · October 14, 2022, 4:40am

Hello @sabbamitta

My apologies if this question was already asked before
Hope you’re well! It’s been a while since I last used SC voice but I seem to recall a few years ago that when you were in a certain sutta and you clicked on it to listen it would auto fill + have the voice file of that particular sutta and it would be ready for you to download or listen to? Is that right?

But now you have to type in the sutta you’re after in the search box and retrieve it that way? Is this correct or maybe I need to do some updates or something? Just wondering. Not a big deal but just thought I’d double-check with you.

Still a great application and very thankful for it

sabbamitta · October 14, 2022, 8:46am

Hi @AdrianMagno, great to hear that people still like Voice!

Trying to understand your question:

Do you mean this? You are in a certain Sutta (here MN 1), and you clicked on it to listen. But then I am not quite sure what you mean.

it would auto-fill
Not sure what you mean by “auto-fill”. There had been years ago an idea to expand all abbreviations that are in the text, but this has long been given up because it was impossible to do.
- have the voice file of that particular Sutta
  Is this not what is playing here? The voice file for MN 1?
and it would be ready for you to download or listen to
At this step you are already listening to it. But one step before it could perhaps be described that way:

Screenshot from 2022-10-14 10-23-13847×515 19.8 KB

Here you have the choice to download (down arrow) or listen to it (play icon).

You can also expand different sections to read the text. Behind the three vertical dots you find also links to SuttaCentral and (if available) to other audio sources.

Well, yes, that would still be the step before. You want to get to MN 1 somehow. I don’t remember it has ever been otherwise, or else I really didn’t understand this question.

However there’s also the possibility to get to a Sutta by a search term. For example “root of suffering”:

Here, MN 1 is the third result.

If you can’t remember how exactly the term was that you are looking for, just start typing “root” or “suffering”, and example search terms will pop up for you to select from.

No, there’s nothing you need to do. If you open Voice you’ll automatically have the current version.

I am not sure if your questions have been answered because I am not sure if I understood them correctly. But nevertheless I hope this helps.

Ah! Maybe this is what you mean!

You mean when you are in a certain Sutta on SuttaCentral and you click on the loudspeaker icon … is it this?

This works not from the Sutta page itself, but from the Sutta overview card:

Clicking the loudspeaker icon takes you to the Voice page of MN 1, like in the above screenshot, and you can either listen or download.

It is true that on SuttaCentral it may be that you don’t get to see the latest content immediately. The site is heavily cached, and it is quite possible that you see the latest changes only after severel page refreshes or a hard refresh.

Whew! Now I feel like I might have really answered your questions!

AdrianMagno · October 14, 2022, 11:07am

Ofcourse it’s a great feature

Yes exactly right, I’m sorry I used the wrong words, my apologies

Okay I think it’s been a while since I last used it so I had forgotten how it works.

Yes clicking on the speaker in the above screenshot, that still works as I remember it!

But what I did was this…

Whilst in the sutta itself, I clicked on the 3 dots…

Then click on “Listen on SC Voice”.

Then you go into SC voice and it’s blank and you have to search for it.

I think you’ve already explained it anyway by saying

So all good I think it’s just been a while since I used it last.

Thanks for your time Sabbamitta, much appreciated

sabbamitta · October 14, 2022, 11:11am

Yes, that right tool bar is indeed visible when you are on a specific Sutta page, but it is not related to any specific Sutta page. So when clicking on the Voice link there, it just takes you to the Voice start page.

I am glad the confusion could be cleared!

So probably you should use Voice more so that you won’t forget it so easily …

AdrianMagno · October 14, 2022, 11:17am

Thank you, I intend to