Wrong tone used?

A

abdrifter

Guest
I noticed that the female voice pronounces the single "chang2" as "chang3". Or am I wrong?
 

denmitch

探花
Abdrifter,
Which word? Are you sure it wasn't in a tone sandi? As an example, if two 3rd tone syllables are spoken in succession, the first 3rd tone becomes second tone.
joy,
李希
 
A

abdrifter

Guest
Just find in Pleco any standalone character with the chang2 sound, like 长, and hear the female version. Sounds suspiciously like chang3 to me. What do you think, or do I need to have my ears looked at?
 

denmitch

探花
I'm hearing 2nd tone. I am on beta 10 which has new voice files so we might be hearing different recording. But I also have always noticed the female voice consistently starts the 2nd tone at a higher pitch than the male. This would not be wrong of itself. I like to compare this differences by alternating both to train the ear. No two native speakers would be identical.
 
A

abdrifter

Guest
I have the old recordings (I assume). So you are saying there's something to look forward to even in this department; beta 10 sounds mystifying. I also alternate both male and female and it's the difference between the two that stands out for me in chang2. Not a big deal though, I'll be learning from the guy :).
 

gato

状元
Abdrifter, you are right. In the current version of Pleco, chang2 is being pronounced as chang3 by the female voice. I hear it, too.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Sorry I didn't jump in here earlier: it actually sounds OK to me, it's a bit low at the beginning but if you compare her chang2 to her chang3 there's a pretty clear difference. But we could certainly tweak it - maybe clip off a bit at the beginning so you don't have as much of a low section.

To be honest, we've never been entirely happy with the female recordings in general and have been thinking for several years now that we ought to commission someone to do a brand new set - would also let us cover some vocabulary we haven't covered before, and would let us record an alternate set of shorter syllables (as we've been doing for our new Cantonese recordings) to stitch together into words.

We've been hesitant to do that mainly because we're not quite sure how interested people are still going to be in pre-recorded audio now that we have our new TTS add-on - it's female only (and the library we licensed doesn't support installing two voices in the same app), so it still leaves a definite need for a male voice at least, but if the sentiment among our users is that they don't really care about female recordings anymore once they have TTS then we may let the issue drop, or at least limit our new recordings to single syllables only. (it's much cheaper / easier to commission ~2000 recordings for single syllables than ~30,000 for multi-syllable words, and while that comment might lead to accusations of stinginess, it's really more a matter of budget allocation - do we spend the money on hiring a contractor for that, or hiring one for something else like improving our new character decomposition and thesaurus databases)
 
A

abdrifter

Guest
I agree, male recording plus female TTS should be plenty. I heard it'll actually be in higher quality than what comes with iOS (still holding my breath for the next big Pleco update).
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Oh yes, considerably higher quality we think. Not even a reflection on Apple's skills in this area as much as the simple fact that they can't afford to use ~70MB of firmware space on a proper Chinese TTS system - users uninterested in Chinese would be decidedly unhappy to waste precious flash memory space on that.

Update is already submitted to Apple, though we may have to hold off on selling the TTS library for a week or so because we need to make sure our vendor for it can supply us with a 64-bit version. (Pleco isn't 64-bit-optimized yet, but it will be in a few updates, and in order for that to work all of our libraries need to be 64-bit too, so we don't want to start selling TTS if we're not sure that we'll be able to continue including it in future updates)
 
A

abdrifter

Guest
Great, I'll pounce as soon as the library is made available. Thanks for the explanation Mike, especially it being weekend and all!
 
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