Text to speech for cards with no audio produces some results that are not even close to correct. Is it possible to turn off this feature and go back to only using audio where it exists?

Can you give me some examples where it's not working well?

I'd also like to hear more about anyone's experiences with the new iOS TTS and whether they like it in general.

I also strongly dislike it. Luckily my iPad doesn't update apps automatically so I'm keeping the previous version. I've seen some outright errors too in the few minutes I used it on iPhone. But even when it's technically correct the pronunciation for Japanese is so poor that quite the opposite of helping me learn, it's an annoying distraction. There really needs to be an option to disable it. When I do use iPhone anymore I just have pronunciation turned off entirely.

From memory I think the ones that come to mind are 削ぐ and 一握り but there were plenty more. I found myself regularly going back a card to check when the mispronunciations got through to my brain after I'd moved on. I can see that some people might be ok with it if they're happy to check the readings at the same time but I've just turned the sound right off. It's too distracting.

I really like it, so don't remove it! But you could make it an option to turn it off. Is it possible to use tts on the example sentences?

In general I like the built in ios tts, but I prefer pleco's new add-in tts 'Hui'.

I have no objections to the chinese version of text to speech. In fact, I find it very useful since it is hard to memorize sound without hearing it, at least for me. While the quality leaves a lot to be desired, overall, it is better to have it than not have it.

I do like the concept of tts and I certainly wouldn't want it removed from other people who like the implementation but in the japanese version anything short of an audio sample by a native speaker doesn't really have much (any?) value add beyond the hiragana reading provided anyway.

So although I'd want more data points, I'm hearing two "hate its" for the Japanese TTS and two "really like its" for the Chinese version, which would seem to point to turning it off for Japanese and leaving it on for Chinese. Could be limited sample, or could be that the Japanese TTS is just worse. More opinions welcome!

Rather than turning it right off, can't an option be added for individuals to turn it on or off in their settings? I'd hate to cause people who do like it to lose it.

If there are a lot of such people, we can do it. Adding options is, non-intuitively, very high-cost, though. So we try to avoid doing it where possible.

On chinese side, I'd probably turn off TTS but not big deal, apart from the concern it might be used as a reason to not increase the number of true audio recordings, which is really what skritter should do. I think you have actual audio for common words now, so by time are hearing TTS should be fully proficient in pinyin so TTS doesn't really help in seeing how natural speech differs slightly from pinyin reading. For example, hearing erhua'd words in natural voice would be nice, but TTS gets every one of these wrong (e.g. 今儿 would be pronounced jin1-er4 by TTS but jinr1/"jir1" in natural speech)

I meant jin1-er2 obviously, rereading ... think pleco tts gets these wrong too, so wasn't suggesting is skritter specific problem

When I saw that there was text to speech in the new version of skritter, I decided not to upgrade. I'd really like to know what this text to speech is like before I upgrade as upgrading on iOS is a one way street.

So, I'd rather there weren't text to speech for Japanese skritter.

97 - Which one of our TTSes gets that wrong?

The licensed "Hui" TTS add-on includes an API to let us override the system reading with our own, so that should be perfectly accurate for headwords at least. The free iOS system TTS doesn't include such an override, so there's not much that we (or Skritter, I suspect) can do about that right now, though given that Apple certainly does override TTS pronunciation in other places (Siri custom name pronunciations, e.g.) I'm hopeful that they'll add such an API in the future.

I've started using tts today and I don't really like it. I find it too mechanical, and it reminds me of 1980's computer games :p. much prefer audio or none at all. I've also found quiet a few tones are wrong, the most common are words with a fourth or third tone at the end are pronounced with a neutral tone, or mumbled. Tks

One more vote - I'm not a big fan of the TTS, although admit I'm impressed it's as good as it is. (I bet in 5 years will be awesome.)

Maybe it just needs to be improved. Maybe the TTS can be forced to speak the correct tones by sending alternative text to it instead of the original characters?

Personally, I can't stand the mechanical text-to-speech voice. The quality is basically too low and it feels unnatural and distracting. (I study Chinese.)

Please add an option to remove this from the app. Thanks.

mikelove - another reason I need to get round to upgrading my pleco then if is better on the paid TTS. But I'd hope the 34,000 natural voice recordings that are also included in upgrade cover most words I'd look at (please give them to skritter for christmas!)

could there be a way for pleco subscribers to access the pleco's sounds in skritter?

I hate the Chinese TTS. It also sometimes plays the real audio and also has TTS. Also now I cannot play background music at the same time as I work in Skiritter. I would really love to download the previous version and skip this one entirely.

How about running a poll on new features before spending a ton of time on them. Why not let your customers vet them? Too much effort to add a switch?

Here's another vote for either turning it off or giving the option to. I find that the robot voice is wrong almost every time, and it's also very jarring.

Sorry, I forgot to say this is for the Japanese version.

Sounds like it makes sense to just turn it off, since we can't override the pronunciations to pass in the correct readings. We'll do that in the next app update.

usbrandon, the reason I put it in was because it was very simple to do in iOS 7, so I thought I'd give it a try, and I kind of liked it for Chinese. (I didn't realize how wrong it was for Japanese.)

Please, give us the option to keep it. As I said, I really like it for Chinese! But even better would be to have a button to play the example sentences.

Nick. Sorry for being curt. Skritter was great before the update. With something like audio, I prefer more options as opposed to less. I don't mind the voice files being played automatically and actually like it. It was interesting suddenly hearing a mans voice come out where a female voice was used previously but it was still good.

Pleco gets off the hook pretty easily because you can select the voice TTS or Hui and I do not use it in the context of wanting to have it try to auto-pronounce words once looked up. In other words, sound never gets in the way because it's just an extra feature for Pleco. Pleco seems to command a higher accuracy for everything; example sentences, word pronunciation, character composition etc. With the undoubted load of hard work, Mike is able to buy accuracy and credibility on a per dictionary basis. Skritter informational content seems mixed, but generally good. Skritter usage also enhanced by auto-playing audio. All or nothing for audio is not good in that case. Thanks for the button to launch Pleco.

Does the way the Skritter experience delivered to users make official dictionaries and example sentence sources unavailable?

It would be nice, even if there were a Skritter premium offering, to have example sentences, definitions etc come from some of these professionally dictionaries.

Thanks for listening. That small feature of being able to play background music during practice was very nice. Hopefully with TTS off it comes back naturally.

Merry Christmas.

Apologies for opening such a can of worms.

I think you guys do a great job with Skritter and I appreciate the cost and commitment needed to run such enterprises. Because of that I'm happy to put up with the occasional bug or annoying 'feature'.

Whether tts stays on, gets turned off, or you bite the bullet and add a user preference, I'll continue to be grateful for a great tool and db.

Have a fantastic Christmas.

Mike

Please let us know when you will be removing it so I can disable the automatic update. I'd like to keep all the sound files I have currently.

I'll add one "don't like" vote for Chinese. I find the voice distracting and there are many minstakes. I haven't kept a record, but I can make a note going forward and post them here.

The words with audio recordings have been more valuable than I could have imagined. While travelling several Chinese people I met commented that my pronounciation was "very good" or "excellent" - I can only attribute this to the excellent audio recordings in skritter and my mimmicing it out loud every time I encounter one.

I'd be happy with an option to turn off TTS only to keep it available for those who find it useful.

The Japanese TTS is just plain wrong most of the time, especialli with postfixes involving ~. Can it be taught to read the kana, not kanji perhaps?

I've made a list of the ones I've encountered so far. I try to approximate the pronounciation I hear with pinyin, but it's not always perfect:

做出 (zuòchū)as zuòchú
六点半 (liùdiǎnbàn) as liùdiǎnbǎn
不问 (búwèn) as būwèn or bùwèn
不看 (búkàn) as būkàn or bùkàn
北京话 (běijīnghuà) as běijīnghuǎ or běijīnghua
冷气机 (lěngqìjī) as lèngqìjī
里边 (lǐbian) as lìbiǎn
里丽 (lǐlì) as lǐlǐ
小王 (xiǎowáng) as xiǎowǎng

I hope this helps!

Using the Japanese version, I neither love nor hate it, though I also came across a few oddities. The most noticeable one was a reading of "kodomo" for 友達 (tomodachi) - so I always keep an eye on the hiragana version anyway.

It does not hurt (much). But I could also do without it.

There's question bias in the website poll choices of "Like It/It's Okay/Hate it/Don't use iOS" - like and okay are pretty neutral words, hate is very strong - opposite of "like it" is not "hate", surely?! Neutral question (if are not offering option of on/off switch) would be "Should iOS TTS be turned off (see forum post XX for discussion)?" - answers "Yes / No / Indifferent / Don't use iOS".

I think the poll is missing a different option: Don't use TTS. Obviously it's not a big deal, but I'm just saying that none of the options apply to me.

I agree with skeleton-san regarding the poll. I can't answer whether I like it or not because I'm not downloading the new version of skritter with TTS in because I'm concerned that I won't be able to later downgrade to a version without it in.

Is there a place where I can report where the pronunciations are wrong? Not that I'm a pro Chinese scholar, but some of these are just blatantly wrong.

mbarnett91, you could submit in-app corrections on bad pronunciations that we've actually recorded, but since we'll be turning the TTS off entirely, it's probably not necessary to note which of the TTS words sound bad.