I recently realized BunPro allows for example sentences to be read out load. I assume the recordings are generated via TTS. If that’s the case, what’s the service being used?
Nevermind, it says: “Digital media voiced and recorded by Haruna Oka”. That’s why it sounded so impressively natural…!
They actually use rabbits to do their voices. It’s quite impressive.
Those are the dulcet tones of BunPro’s very own Haruna san. As I’ve heard it a lot only in the context of doing BP reviews, I think I’d find it a very weird experience to ever speak to her to person, a bit like meeting a celebrity I guess. I had the same when I met a colleague with whom I zoomed with for 2 years before we met in person.
Actually “only” the grammar lesson’s sentences are human voiced.
By the way I’m wondering if the male voice actor is a native speaker. It sometimes sounds weird to my beginner’s ears.
Exemple sentences for vocab decks are TTS and still a bit off now and then, but it’s a work in progress.
It’s a program called Haruna, a very advanced AI, currently not available to the public, developed in Japan. Very few people can see it in action, and it probably comes with a very expensive monthly fee. They also use it to generate some practice content here in the forum for free!
You can also interact with her language model by invoking @ Haru, as of late, there’s no increased subscription cost for doing so.
Haruna does most of the audio for grammar! However we are looking more into AI in the future, as it is starting to get more and more ridiculously real. A good example is Elevenlabs. If you put Japanese text into some of those voices it’s like ‘whoa, this isn’t a person??’
I completely understand the ‘but it’s AI’ argument, but once it’s perfect, it’s perfect.