Better pronunciation audio for "phrase" flashcards

A couple of features I'd like to see implemented for "phrase" flashcards (i.e. flashcards not just for a character or word, but for a sentence/phrase):

Feature 1)
To use the pronunciation available from the constituent words, rather than having Pleco pronounce it character by character. Obviously I don't expect this to be automatic.

Feature 2)
To be able to record your own pronunciation for flashcards.

I'd have thought feature #2 would be relatively easy to implement, and benefit a large number of users.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thanks!

eddiewould said:
To use the pronunciation available from the constituent words, rather than having Pleco pronounce it character by character. Obviously I don't expect this to be automatic.

Already supported on Android via our experimental "text-to-speech" add-ons, and coming shortly on iOS as well (around the same time that they cease to be "experimental").

eddiewould said:
To be able to record your own pronunciation for flashcards.

I'd have thought feature #2 would be relatively easy to implement, and benefit a large number of users.

That one is actually the trickier of the two - recording / storing / playing audio is quite easy, but backing up / synchronizing large amounts of audio data is not, and the problem is compounded by Apple's recent pushiness concerning apps backing up large quantities of data to iCloud (if your app's average backup size is too large they start sending you threatening emails). Plus we've got to juggle people manually backing up flashcard databases and transferring them between iOS / Android, so we need some sort of a single-file "package format" to cover all of your audio recordings / actual flashcard database / etc, and a way to preserve links between flashcards and their associated audio even if things get mixed up and reshuffled.

So it'll probably happen eventually, along with embedded images, but it's not an urgent priority because it's a lot of work and we think text-to-speech will cover most of the same needs (and enable a lot of other useful things too).
 
Top