SuttaCentral Voice version 1.6 released

Meta dev
1

The next version of SC-Voice has just been released.

Next to the Pali version of Bhante Sujato’s sutta recordings which had been added in the previous release we now also have the English version of what is already available, i.e. SN 1.1–SN 2.20. More suttas will come as Bhante’s recordings go ahead. @michaelh has been working hard to improve the segment matches, and much of the original bumpiness could be removed. If you come across instances of mismatches, it would be helpful for us if you report it in this thread.

You will also notice that the lookout of what was formerly called “Other resources”—and that had been well hidden behind a number of mouse clicks in places not easy to find—has now changed. We want to make all of Voices resources as easily accessible as possible, and with @Aminah’s and @karl_lew’s amazing work this is now so not only for sighted users but also for screen reader users!

With great gratitude to @phineas-pta we have added recordings of the Vietnamese sutta translations to Voice. They can be found when clicking on “Other audio sources” in the “More” Bildschirmfoto%20vom%202019-07-28%2021-40-23 menu:

Bildschirmfoto%20von%202019-07-30%2018-00-36

So far we have all the Dīghanikāya suttas, and more Nikāyas will follow.

Unfortunately the existence of Vietnamese audios is not visible to users directly in Voice. This would be most desirable, but with the limited resources of our tiny team all we can do at the moment is adding them at all. For this and many more reasons we would warmly invite anyone who would like to join us and strengthen our team.

Another thing that has been improved is the precision of the time indicator. You will now also see time estimates behind each item in your search results list. These estimates are based on the reading time of the English voice only; so if you have selected bilingual Pali/English it will be longer.

The Voice server has more storage space now. This means that we can install more VSMs, and the range of suttas with fast download and play will increase. It also means that a certain admin whose name starts with “S” and ends in “abbamitta” doesn’t need to clear caches on a weekly basis any more in order to make sure that the server doesn’t overflow. :blush:

Also, content changes on the SC main site have again been updated for Voice, and from now on such updates can be made by admins who do not necessarily have developer skills; this means that volunteers who wold like to support our work would be able to do this by clicking a few buttons.

We hope that you keep enjoying Voice! Any feedback is most welcome! If you would like to help improving this awesome application please let us know. :star_struck:

(You can see from my wording how fascinated I always am with Voice, and I am regularly dedicating more time to it than I actually think I would… :wink: What can you do! :woman_shrugging:)

For the full list of release items see here.

16 Likes
2

And thank you to Anagarika Sabbamitta for endless patience, humor and vigilance herding us Voice cats.

For those curious to dive into Bhante Sujato’s segmented audio (thank you Michael!), try out SN2.3 and click the play icon. You will hear Aditi/Amy start reading and Bhante Sujato will pick up for both the Pali and English segments. Aditi and Amy will only fill in as necessary, as they do for the first two segments.

You will also find Bhante Sujato’s original audio recordings for SN2.3 listed under the new More menu (thank you, Aminah!)

54%20AM
54%20AM716×470 13.2 KB

Your existing voice preferences are unchanged, so if you wish to hear Bhante Sujato, make sure to select that voice preference. For suttas with no current segmented human audio, the voices will revert to Amy/Aditi.

7 Likes
3

All available VSMs have been installed by now: AN, DN, MN, and KN (i.e. Thig & Thag) in Pali with Aditi’s voice.

3 Likes
4

Yippee! Fast Pali!

Thank you, Anagarika Sabbamitta. :pray:

1 Like
5

This is incredible work, as always!

Just so you know, I really want to get back to recording. But right now my focus is on getting Brahmali’s Vinaya translation ready, so he can commence work on revising it. Hopefully this will be done soon!

9 Likes
6

This surely is incredible work too! Looking forward to reading it on SuttaCentral—and perhaps one day listening to it in Voice. :smile:

And—maybe this is a good place to mention this—Voice (and so many other things) would never be possible without your ingenious idea to segment the Pali text! :anjal:

4 Likes
7

I can’t claim that it was my idea as such: we just wanted to use a translation app, and the app required us to segment the text. The genius—which was in reality a slow dawning realization of Blake and myself—was that segmenting was an incredibly powerful tool that could be applied in many ways. And of course, it took Karl to realize how it could be applied to audio!

6 Likes
8

Bhante, we are really looking forward to bringing the Vinaya to Voice. Thank you. :pray:

We’re still needing time to sort out the challenges of segmented audio. We currently use one file per segment audio, so that would involve the creation of some 240,000 files. Michael and I are still trying to figure out the best way to store segmented audio. What you have recorded already is enough for us to update the technology to handle future human audio recordings. Perhaps one day we’ll even be able to hear Ajahn Brahmali speak the Vinaya in Norwegian!

In that regard Voice will also need to be upgraded to support internationalization (i18n) over the coming releases in preparation for Bilara opening up the segmented translation floodgates.

8 Likes
9

I heard the voice version and it is fantastic the pronunciation of Pali and English not text is awesome.

It will be beneficial to have aa speed control

3 Likes
10

Thanks for the suggestion!

For English there are three different voices for selection who have different speeds; but no, actual speed control for any individual voice isn’t there. I am not sure this is technically possible—maybe a question for @karl_lew. Given the list of things we have in the pipeline and the scarcity of our resources however it seems unlikely to me this will happen in the foreseeable future.

3 Likes
11

Ang. @sabbamitta and I were just talking about this and through our discussion we realized that one already existing solution to this would be to download the sutta/s you want to listen to and play it with a player that has a speed control facility, for example, VLC:

Brilliant suggestion, Ang. @sabbamitta! :pray:

In fact, there is a bonus benefit of using Voice this way: if you’re planning on listening to the sutta more than once, downloading audiovisual media, rather than streaming it leaves a lighter carbon footprint.

4 Likes
12

That’s brilliant I will give it a try, thank you for immediate help and turnaround

3 Likes
13

Many months ago I downloaded DN33/Amy as my walking meditation focus. I think a lot and listening to DN33 is an excellent way to put a firm fence around my thoughts–any wandering thought is wholesome (e.g., “what did Sariputa mean by X?”). That download is about 110 minutes long. Recently i downloaded DN33/Raveena. The pace is a bit quicker so I can hear more of the sutta if available time is short. I have found regular and repeated listening to suttas of enormous benefit. After a year of listening to DN33 I still find new stuff on each listening.

I use Dropbox to hear the downloaded suttas since I am walking in Airplane Mode using my phone. Speed itself is not a concern since restlessness is also…a fetter.

5 Likes