What Happened to Audio?

Yeah the audio on the new TTS sounds a little compressed, but the sentence-reading itself is MUCH better than the previous TTS imo. If I had to choose between the two I’d choose the new one despite the audio compression, so it’s good to know the compression is unintended.

1 Like

It will be fixed in a few hours or so. We figured out the problem and are reprocessing the files now.

5 Likes

The voice is MUCH better now.

Edit: For what has been updated, so far :).

There is a bit of artifacting (?) with the female voice when there is a word with a quick pitch upward, like 毎日. It happens with all vowels; ランク is an example of an ‘a’ vowel word; 便利 is an example of an ‘e’ vowel word. The male voice has it in places, too.

Just pointing it out incase there is something you can do, or it is something that can be passed on to the azure team. Not a big deal.

3 Likes

@Flandre5carlet @kizzlesully @FlippFuzz @Curnan2

The file was using low sample rate, which caused it to sound flat and muffled.
It should be fixed now :+1:

3 Likes

Any examples of specific sentences that you can give me that sound particularly odd, I can see if I can fiddle around with or create custom lexicon entries so that they read correctly. Feel free to go nuts on the suggestions!

I know there are a few misreadings like びみしい instead of おいしい sometimes when kanji is used, but these seem to be random errors that occur every now and then rather than every time, so it will just be a matter of fixing the ones that are off. Thankfully from my testing less than 1% of sentences I would say have mispronunciations.

Sending error reports on the site, in this thread, or directly to me via PM is completely fine! I will fix the things I can, and might make some suggestions to Microsoft about anything weird that I can’t fix myself.

Note - There’s no need to report spacing things like one word being said too quickly after the previous one. I am already working on a fix for this in most places where it would matter.

2 Likes

The new uncompressed audio seems really great to me. Please role this out to all audio sentences! Really makes a difference in quality of listening practice.

2 Likes

Shall do. We are doing one N-level at a time as I fix a few formatting things that allow us to get much better pacing consistency and make bulk changes easily. Just finished N3, so that should be getting processed today and uploaded tonight all going well. N2 and N1 will be a few days to a week after that, and then we’ll do all the remaining additional list stuff.

3 Likes

Just an additional point here, as of last night a large number of the (I assume yet-to-be-updated) recordings have stopped playing. I assume this is all part of the upgrade, but just flagging this in case.

4 Likes

I believe this should be fixed now.

2 Likes

Hi!
I think the new audio is very good! But I noticed some mistakes during my reviews this morning.
On 放っておく: 放っておく (日本語能力試験 N4) | Bunpro I think the audio for that word is wrong.
Also on 表面 表面 (日本語能力試験 N3) | Bunpro the first sentence, the audio for 月 is wrong too. After that I decided to check the vocabulary for 月 (moon) 月 (日本語能力試験 N5) | Bunpro and seems some of them are wrong too.
Also on 包む 包む (日本語能力試験 N4) | Bunpro the furigana for that word is くるむ but the TTS keeps reading it as つつむ so I can’t tell which one is wrong here. :sweat_smile:

3 Likes

Just want to give a shout-out to the team because the new audio is
better by miles than it used to be! Makes a huge difference… :slight_smile:

1 Like