Question: Is it possible for audio in the file reader?

[pleco10]

(I did a quick search but didnt find anything relevant to this question)

Is it possible for audio pronunciations inside the file reader? I just DLed a Chinese text from Project Gutenberg, and am interested in having the Chinese words spoken aloud.

(Thx for the excellent support by the way! )

 

[numble]

If you have an iPad, this is possible (in an inelegant fashion) by enabling text to speech in the iPad's "Accessibility" settings.

 

[mikelove]

You can play individual words in the reader by just tapping on the audio button when the reader popup "bubble" is visible, but there's no way to play an entire text out loud - our system really isn't designed for that sort of thing, it's a lot more complicated than just playing one word after another (or one syllable after another) since to make it listenable for more than a few words at a time you really need to have proper intonation / pauses / etc. We might license a text-to-speech system in the future, but it's likely to be rather expensive so that may not happen for a while; hopefully Apple will make its accessibility system directly usable by programs in a future OS update so that we can simply hook into that.

 

[numble]

Playing around with the iPad more, I've found some interesting features. You can set the home button to activate/deactivate voiceover mode on a triple click of the home button. Unfortunately, it will only read Chinese text if you have your language settings set to Chinese (and then it will read English in a Chinese accent). And it does not seem compatible with Pleco's reader in Voiceover mode (though it works in some other apps).

 

[mikelove]

Interesting - I really do hope they add a programming interface for direct access to VoiceOver, that would let us provide a more fluid user interface for this stuff. Though tagged native-speaker recordings would still be a better bet. It won't work with our document reader because we use a custom user interface control that VoiceOver doesn't know how to access - we could add some code to let it access it, but without a way to work around that Chinese reading issue I don't know if many people would be likely to use it.