Voice release v2.9 SuttaCentral 2021

Following SuttaCentral’s recent update, Voice needed to adapt its code in a few respects. If no new bugs appear, we will release this tomorrow.

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Voice v2.9 SuttaCentral 2021 has just been released. Issues that have been worked on are:

  • Voice now only uses the “published” branch of the Sutta repository.
  • As segmented Vinaya text had been added, the Voice search broke for terms that appear also in the Vinaya, like for example nun.
  • Support for legacy texts in Voice was broken.

Besides fixing these bugs, more processes behind the scenes have been changed, things that used to be done manually have been automated (with a lot of patience and perseverance and creativity by @karl_lew), one other bug and one mispronunciation have been fixed, and much new content and many new examples have been added. Find all issues of the release here.

What still needs to be done is support for Ajahn Brahmali’s Vinaya translation. This is a big task that we think to address after our ebt-site projects have come to some degree of maturity. We have been able to release Dhammaregen recently as a first prototype, and more is to come in due course.

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Thank you, Anagarika Sabbamitta. :pray:

Much of the work done on this release of Voice is internal and necessary to re-align Voice implementation with SuttaCentral 2021. Now that the new published branch publication model is active, we have deprecated the sc-voice fork of bilara-data in favor of using suttacentral/bilara-data directly.

As Anagarika mentions, we have much more work remaining to support all the wonderful new segmented translations available on Suttacentral.net. For example, right now the code actually assumes “sujato” as the default translator for “en” segmented text. Now we have “brahmali”, “patton” and “sujato”, so the code needs to be written properly.

In addition, we’ve been experimenting with automated content production so that newly published content will automatically be shown by Voice as it appears in the published branch of bilara-data. That work has started but is not yet complete.

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I just want to begin by saying I’m a huge fan of SC Voice :heart_eyes: and think it is such a gem :gem: of an application, I am very grateful :pray:

I recently downloaded Kp 6 Ratana sutta and noticed that it dropped the word ‘fruit’ at the end of this verse below.

image

so it ended up being ‘imersion with immediate’, minus ‘fruit’.

I’ve listened to a few SC Voice downloads and this is the first instance that I’ve come across of the example above so that is an excellent track record.

Thank you once again :pray:

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Thank you for your error report. We’ve got no error reports for a long time now, I started already wondering if perhaps no-one uses Voice any more … but obviously that’s not the case. And I am glad to hear that you like it!

Could you please still specify which browser and OS you are using, and which download format you used?

I am calling @karl_lew’s attention on the issue.

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Dear Anagarika @sabbamitta .The voices in SuttaVoice are wonderful, and pardon me that I was rather late to all this but may I ask that where can I type in the text so that the Voice can read it to me?

I use an iPhone 5S

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I am not exactly sure what you would like to do, UttamaSanti.

  • Do you want to listen to Suttas?
  • Or do you want to use the narrators used in Voice for an independent text?

If the latter, you would have to go to the website of AWS where we get the voices from. You can select from various languages and narrators. You can paste in your text (a limited amount of text) and listen to it directly or create a downloadable file; but it might be that you need to create a user account in order to do this.

Or else I haven’t understood your question properly …

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Yes, I mean this, thank you for your reply. Actually my iPhone do have that function already, and it’s free :wink:. I use them to read out loud the texts for me with a Siri British male voice.

I recorded some of it here:

It was quite time consuming because of al lot of editing, so I have rather stopped the project now. But your work is very lovely and kusala. I wish that SuttaVoice will all work well and seamlessly :pray:t3: and be of great benefits to many. Thank you again for your quick reply.

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Yes, iPhones do come with their own narrator. It’s a different voice however than what we use. Voice mostly went to AWS for the narrators because of the Pali voice. AWS has a voice, Aditi, which has been programmed for Hindi. Hindi has many phonemes in common with Pali, so Aditi could be adapted to speak the Pali texts. Voices that have been programmed for English or other non-Indian languages have difficulties pronouncing Pali correctly.

Oh, you made audio files for Dhamma texts with your robot voice, nice! Yes, I imagine this is a lot of work! Sadhu!

If it’s about the Suttas that are on SuttaCentral, Voice works fine with no extra work.

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Wow! Voice ate the fruit. :watermelon: :open_mouth:

Thank you for finding this strange bug. I hear the absence as well. Voice does not say “fruit”. I will look into this.

(Anagarika, this also affects EBT-Site).

I’m glad Siri works for you with Voice. If you wish to hear Voice speak directly, you may click the
play-circle-outline icon to launch the Voice sutta player. Voice does play on my iPhone 12 (but I do not know if iPhone 5s works):

As Anagarika Sabbamitta mentions, Siri will not speak Pali correctly and Voice has a specially trained Pali narrator known as Aditi.

I believe you wish to have Voice speak a chosen segment directly? If that is the case, then we are working on a solution to that as a separate application known as EBT-Site. Currently, that application does not yet work with my iPhone 12, however. The Voice player does allow start/stop and random access navigation through segments, but it is a bit tedious to just “play this segment”.

If I have misunderstood your question, please say more…

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Yes, this seems to be a rare bug. Karl has found the root of the evil and fixed it, it works on testing. Tomorrow we will release the fix to Voice production (I borrowed your name to name the release :wink:).

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Just as an aside - I listened to this talk you posted. It’s a very nice talk and description of the meditation process - short and to the point and from a perspective a bit different to usual - Thank you :slight_smile:

I think it might be worthwhile to post it on it’s own right in the Audio Visual category, so others can find it :pray: :dharmawheel:

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Thank you @sabbamitta and @karl_lew for your speedy replies :slight_smile:

My apologies for the delayed response as it was close to bed time when I posted last night :sleeping:

This app is truly a blessing and I have found it very helpful for committing the suttas to memory so please continue your good work!

Thank you once again to you both :pray:

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