Only pronounce audio using TTS

[shiki]

I saw somewhere in this forum that you suggested deleting the downloadable audio pronunciations from male and female speaker to get the TTS pronunciation for head words working but I've found this doesn't work on the main dictionary page. And though it works in the popup, I first hear the male speaker pronunciation and have to click the speaker button to get to the TTS (even with all audio packs uninstalled).
For those people like me who already prefer TTS, it would be super useful if we simply had a button in the settings like "use TTS for all audio pronunciations" that worked in the main dictionary menu and in the popup, basically everywhere there's a speaker. That way there's no extra button presses and we get a more consistent audio experience overall.

 

[mikelove]

Have you set the preferred gender to female? Otherwise it's going to assume you want a male (or alternating) voice and use the recordings because those are the only male voice available.

 

[shiki]

It's set to male. But no off setting

 

[mikelove]

Does it help if you set it to just 'female'?

 

[shiki]

If I set it to female or male, I seem to lose the TTS completely. I mean, maybe it's your guys TTS I'm not sure but the TTS I want, the system TTS under sentence TTS isn't being played unless I use any of the "alternating" settings. I've learned that if the alternating female first setting is selected I can get my TTS pronounced first (I don't have a female voice setting in the TTS app but I guess it's being recognized as female by your app?) but that doesn't work for all words and still nothing for the main dictionary page. In addition to "use TTS if no recording" I wish there was a use (system) TTS just like there is for sentences.

 

[mikelove]

Sorry, are you using one of our paid TTS add-ons or the Android system TTS?

The app tries very hard not to use the Android system TTS for playing headwords because that doesn't support specifying which syllables + tones we want to use - we just give it a list of characters and hope it outputs the same ones that we're showing on the entry. For reading entire sentences that's not a huge deal, but if, say, you're looking at the entry for 地, we have no way to tell Android whether it's supposed to say di4 or de5. So if we supported it for headwords, it would be horrifically buggy, not to mention downright confusing to users whose Mandarin wasn't strong enough to realize that the audio they were hearing was wrong.

So if you'd like to have headwords played with TTS, unfortunately at the moment the only way to get that is to buy one of our TTS add-ons (which do allow us to override the pronunciation).

 

[shiki]

I'm using a TTS app which I guess is detected as android system TTS.

Okay I completely understand the reasoning now!

By the way, I see a female Taiwan audio bundle but no male Taiwan bundle. Are there any plans to add a Taiwan male voice ? And any plan to add a HQ version like the other bundles have ?

Thanks for your help

 

[mikelove]

The company we license our TTS voices from doesn't offer a Taiwan male at at the moment, we'd certainly be interested in licensing it if they ever do but they haven't shared any plans about that with us.

We actually have new, even higher quality neural network versions of all 7 voices in the works - they're already included in the 4.0 beta on iOS and should be on Android at some point as well.

 

[stoney]

I also have a similar concern. I am on Android and have the mandarin male/female voices installed. Now I hear these recordings and the system TTS depending how I have it set up.

I am planning to purchase the Pleco Qiang TTS. I want the option to only hear the Pleco TTS for head words and sentences. I don't want it to alternate with the recordings or system TTS. I only want to hear Pleco TTS. Is it possible to set it up like this?

 

[mikelove]

I am planning to purchase the Pleco Qiang TTS. I want the option to only hear the Pleco TTS for head words and sentences. I don't want it to alternate with the recordings or system TTS. I only want to hear Pleco TTS. Is it possible to set it up like this?

If you set the gender for headword audio to 'male' and you leave only Qiang checked in the TTS voices section, that would generally be the only audio you would hear both for headwords and sentences; the one exception is that it would still use audio recordings for single-syllable words.