Missing Audio Voices?

[blogscot]

Before the recent update when studying Spanish I recall that the audio oscillated between two different voices: male and female. Now, there appears to be only a single male voice (sadly), however, I’ve noticed whenever I start a new session there is second voice, played only once, which is not the now standard male voice.

I don’t know if the correct behaviour should be as prior to the update, or if the one-off second voice is an anomaly, but something at the moment isn’t quite right.

Oh, I should mention I notice this particularly when running through the listening exercises.

[mike]

Thanks for letting us know! Might you be able to send a screenshot of your game settings? Curious if you have Clozemaster voices turned on or if you’re using system voices. For Clozemaster voices - it looks like voice is no longer selected randomly / just the first voice option is selected. We should be able to switch that back to random.

[blogscot]

@mike, I’ve pressed all the buttons I can think of. Not sure where the voice settings are hiding themselves.

[mike]

Sorry about that! Button with the gear icon bottom right while playing on the web. The random voices should also now be back when using Clozemaster voices.

[blogscot]

Here are my settings:

When I use the Clozemaster voice during the Listening exercises, I’m still hearing the same male voice throughout, however, switching to system voices I can hear the random voices as expected.

Also, when I tried using Firefox and Safari browser (I normally use Chrome) I found that no voice was played the very first time a Listening exercise was started, but played the single male voice after entry and with subsequent sentences. This may be connected to the behaviour I mentioned above where the first voice played was different to single male voice that was played subsequently.

[kadrian]

I also miss not having alternating male and female voices, and would love to see that feature returned as a Clozemaster voice option (that doesn’t depend on your device providing other options).

[mike]

Thanks for the additional info! Clozemaster should now be alternating randomly between a male and a female voice for Spanish for real this time Please let me know if not.

Also, when I tried using Firefox and Safari browser (I normally use Chrome) I found that no voice was played the very first time a Listening exercise was started

Seems like this might be due to some browser preventing audio from auto-playing until there’s a user interaction. I thought we had a solution in place (asking you to click to play the first sentence), but sounds like that’s not working - will double check. Thanks for letting us know.

@kadrian

I also miss not having alternating male and female voices, and would love to see that feature returned as a Clozemaster voice option (that doesn’t depend on your device providing other options).

Thanks for letting us know! A number of other users have mentioned the same, may take a bit of time still but will see what we can do.

[blogscot]

Thanks for the additional info! Clozemaster should now be alternating randomly between a male and a female voice for Spanish for real this time Please let me know if not.

Thanks @mike. It’s working well now

[kadrian]

I’m getting alternating male and female voices for French from English, too. Thank you!

[kadrian]

I’m now only getting the male voice for French from English (Firefox). Has something changed?

[mike]

Not intentionally Which collection are you playing, and might you be able to send a screenshot of your game settings?

[kadrian]

Strangely, I get alternating male and female voices when playing other categories, it just seems to be the >50,000 category that only gives me the male voice.

ETA: I was trying to add the above comment as a separate post in this thread, and instead edited my previous comment by mistake (I find that if I’ve ever edited a post in a thread, every time I return to the thread it pops up again in draft even if I’ve said I want to discard it).

Here are my settings again:

[LuciusVorenusX]

@mike

Sorry about that! Button with the gear icon bottom right while playing on the web. The random voices should also now be back when using Clozemaster voices.

I was going to post a comment about not getting random voices in custom collections and I went to check my settings first, except when I click the gear icon, I get this. And ONLY this:

Nothing about voices, sound effects… nada.

[blogscot]

That confused me at first too. The voice settings are configured via the gear icon when you’re completing sentences, not the one on the dashboard page.

[LuciusVorenusX]

@blogscot

The voice settings are configured via the gear icon when you’re completing sentences, not the one on the dashboard page.

{Wow; the system auto-edited this post to remove the quote above on the basis that the quote was the “whole post”. As in, both lines, all two sentences. Count 'em, one line and three words. It was therefore unclear as to what was “much appreciated”. I’ve therefore reinstated the quote, sans the first sentence. I trust this will meet with the system’s approval.}

Much appreciated. That allows me to return to the topic at hand.

In Italian at least there are three voices:

• One that sounds like a human male. (But probably isn’t. While the voice quality is usually relatively high, the number of times that the voice chokes on syllables or comes up with a pronunciation that is so far off base as to be in a completely different park suggests that it’s not an actual person behind this voice, though it may be sounds sampled from a human voice.)
• One that sounds like a human female. The comments above apply to it as well.
• An irritating, high pitched, staccato computer voice that is supposedly female but which NOBODY could mistake for being human rather than a refugee from the voice synthesizer of a 1988 vintage Commodore Amiga computer. She also has a very slight out of phase echo that makes her just that little bit harder to understand. Thus, for the sake of brevity, let’s refer to this voice as “Back-feed Betty”.

This is my setting for new content, like FFT; it’s set to Use Clozemaster voice:

Doing that gives me one of the three voices above. (Which does indeed seem to be random, which makes it slightly off-putting when I hear a male voice use a female noun or verb ending… but that’s a different conversation.) Back-feed Betty rarely appears with that setting, but it’s not unknown.

If I turn that off, I get the options of “Random” or some Microsoft voice.

Except “random” isn’t really “random” in the sense above. As far as I can tell the only voice I get is Back-feed Betty.

When reviewing a built in collection, I have the same options.

But when I create a CUSTOM collection, even when it is created entirely of questions that are already in the database, I have no option for “Use Clozemaster Voice”. The only option I have is “System Voice” which is supposedly “random” but is in fact, you guessed it, all Back-feed Betty, all the time.

I can understand if there is some process that the questions need to go through to be matched to the human-sounding Clozemaster voices; obviously any questions that are created from scratch won’t have that. But the ones that are plucked from the existing database… I’m at a loss to figure why Betty needs to be inflicted on our ears 100% of the time for those, just because they’re in a custom collection.

[kadrian]

Today I played a round of 20 reviews in every Most Common Word category in French from English.

'>50,000 most common: male voice only
50,000: male voice only
20,000: male voice only
10,000: male voice 17 times, female voice 3 times
5,000: male voice only
4,000: male voice 19 times, female voice once
3,000: male voice only
2,000: male voice only
1,000: male voice only
500: male voice only
100: male voice only
FFT: approx 50% (two or three of one, followed by two or three of the other)

[mike]

Thanks for all the feedback!

@LuciusVorenusX @blogscot will see if we can come up with a different icon for the dashboard settings, thanks for letting us know it’s a bit confusing using the gear icon for both.

@LuciusVorenusX thanks for the heads up about Back-feed Betty and the voices in general.

But when I create a CUSTOM collection, even when it is created entirely of questions that are already in the database, I have no option for “Use Clozemaster Voice”. The only option I have is “System Voice” which is supposedly “random” but is in fact, you guessed it, all Back-feed Betty, all the time.

We’re working on making the Clozemaster voices available for custom collections as well. Back-feed Betty will likely then only be used when a Clozemaster voice isn’t available - we’ll need to update the settings/UI to make this clear.

@kadrian thanks for the counts! I’d played a few rounds from a few of the collections you listed and got a decent mix of male/female voices, so while it may’ve partially been bad luck, it does seem like a lot of bad luck to get that many male-voice-only rounds I’ll see if we can try improving the randomness of the voice selection.

[kadrian]

I just tried playing a round of 20 reviews in every most common word category in French from English again.

I got the male voice 100% of the time, except for the following:

6/20 female voice in 5,000 most common category
1/20 female voice in 3,000 most common category

8/20 female voice in FFT.

I don’t think I was having this issue when I was still playing new sentences, but I’ve played all the sentences in those categories now, so I can’t check. The vast majority of the reviews I just did were 25% reviews and I got the male voice for all of them except once in the 3,000 word category. The few 75% reviews I did seemed to be about 50-50.

[kadrian]

Then I tried a round of 10 reviews in each collection on my Android phone. I got 100% the male voice, except for 1 female voice in the 2,000 category, and 50-50 in the FFT.