Happy New Year All!
Today we have the huge pleasure of being able to officially introduce a project that has been in the works for several months now, and that I have been dying to leak, but somehow managed to keep under wraps…
A complete revamp of the audio on Bunpro!
Just how complete?
Complete complete.
As some of you may have already noticed in N5, there is a completely new set of female voice recordings.
This will be happening with the male recordings as well, and will apply to all of the audio on the website
TTSは？ 👀
This includes the replacement of all the AI generated TTS (text-to-speech) Vocab audio too! (eventually)
The male recordings are still processing, but we already have all of the female content, so all the way through N1 will be getting added to the site within the next few weeks!
Oh, and also, this also includes new audio for all of the Reading Passages!
What makes it so special?
I am glad you asked!
Here is a list of some of the things you will notice straight away with the new recordings:
Character voices
As we are using professional Japanese voice actors, we encouraged them to use any of their character voices that they felt fit the sentences or scripts they were reading. If you’re really keen-eared, you may even recognize a voice from one of their professional game/anime works! Check out some of them in the readings! N4 reading examples.
Quality
As it has all been professionally recorded, the editing itself is also top-notch! It’s an absolute joy to listen to and will have you creating ghosts just because you wanna hear them over and over again!
Audio Player Feature Additions
The audio is getting an upgrade, so we also of course had to update our player!
As some of you may know, these have been available for a while now, but we’ve only just found the right announcement to talk about them:
Timestamps in Reading Passages
Navigate to and from each individual sentence within Reading Passages!
Stuck on something in particular in one of our longer passages? Play the part that you are having trouble with again, or just play the same sentence over and over because you’re having a good time!
“Alternating” gender mode for Examples
Want to hear both, the genders for a particular sentence during Reviews?
Now you can change your Preferred Voice Gender to “Alternate”, and the audio will switch backwards and forwards between the Male and Female voice actors.
This can be set in the Voice Preferences menu (the audio player settings popout):
Thanks to @discopatrick for the great suggestion!
Playback Speed Slider
A few users mentioned that ‘Slow’ mode was a bit too slow, and normal speed was a bit too fast.
So we’ve given you a slider to adjust, to specify exactly what speed fits your listening ability.
This too can be found in the audio player settings.
That about wraps it up!
All of this audio will slowly be released over the coming weeks (for Grammar) and months (for Vocab), but we were so excited about it, and wanted to start this year off with a bang!
We hope all of your studies this year go smoothly, and we look forward to what 2025 will bring.
Lastly, a massive thank you to @Haru who has been voicing all of the Bunpro audio for the last several years. The time and effort that you put into the voice recordings in order to make all of our learning experiences better will not be forgotten! Each and every one of us on the team and within the community appreciate your colossal efforts! 
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