In the last day or two, text-to-speech has stopped working for my Mandarin Chinese custom collections on Android, even though my phone has a voice installed. Now I can only play in Vocabulary mode, which I don’t like to do.
Is there anything I can do about this? It had been working fine.
It doesn’t appear to be just you. I just (briefly) enrolled in Mandarin, set up a custom collection (albeit with not the first clue of what the symbols sounded like or meant), and found that when I switched over to the Android app:
In Fluency Fast Track I did have the option, and did get the sound normally.
I checked the Play Store to see whether there was an update available, but Play Store advised that the last update was 26 Oct 2020, which was the one I had installed.
Edit: I found this to also be true in Web, which probably rules out Android as the culprit.
I would say that something has broken on the server side in relation to Mandarin. (It still works normally in Italian, for example.)
Thanks for letting us know! The text-to-speech for custom collections still comes from your device. We’re working on adding a way to add text-to-speech that’s available cross device like it is for the Clozemaster collections. In the meantime @kadrian - has anything changed on your device? Any updates? You mentioned your phone has a voice installed - might you be able to send a screenshot?
@LuciusVorenusX it sounds like your device might not have a Mandarin voice available which is why there was no listening option for the custom collection, whereas it does for Italian.
It may be that the app simply isn’t finding the Mandarin voices correctly, in which case we’ll have to figure out a fix for the next update. That it changed recently, @kadrian, and given no recent mobile app updates like @LuciusVorenusX mentioned, I suspect something might’ve changed on your device, or perhaps some kind of update with Android.
My first thought was "but, but, as I said it doesn’t work on Web either!
Then I realised one critical error in my thought process; I only tested it on my default browser, which is Firefox. When I tried it on CHROME, on the other hand, the listening option WAS available and working in Mandarin.
(By the way, not that this is a problem, but when you delete a language the system fibs to you. I deleted Mandarin, acknowledged the dialogs saying that everything will be lost forever, then went into the language again to do further tests a few hours later… and found my custom collections from the earlier tests still there. Not that I ever plan to do that regularly of course, but it’s nice to know that all may not be really lost if it’s done unintentionally. Maybe.)
@mike I think you might have done something to make my custom collections play in Listening mode again, since they’re doing it today, but not with the voice I used to use. If so, thank you!
I don’t know how helpful this screenshot is, but if I press the Play button in the phone settings below, it plays the voice that used to work for my custom collections, which I think shows it is installed on my phone. When I made this post the other day, Clozemaster didn’t seem to be recognising it.
This is what I see now for CM voices available for my Mandarin Chinese custom collections:
In any case, it’s working now!
I’ve started uploading my own sentences to a custom collection, but text-to-speech isn’t available for them. I’m not sure if this is exactly the same as the original complaint because text-to-speech still works if I copy sentences from the Random Collection into a custom collection. It’s only brand new sentences that don’t work.
Is there something I need to do on my end to address this? Or something on the back end?
I’m doing Ukrainian on a Windows laptop with Chrome. I’ve installed a text-to-speech extension and verified that it works, but I’d greatly prefer not having to manually highlight the text and click a button after every sentence.
This doesn’t solve your problem, but just for reference it’s not a universal issue; I just went to one of my custom collections that consists of nothing but sentences that I created from scratch in Italian, and all features including text to speech are still working as normal.
That said… I just bit the bullet and started Ukrainian temporarily myself and found the same as you on both Firefox and Chrome. Listening is available as an option on both for the Random Collection; it’s not available on a custom collection that I just created with a custom question that I created.
It’s the same on the Android app.
So… I’d say there IS an issue with custom collections in Ukrainian.
I don’t know if this information is relevant, but recently I reported a mistake in a sentence, and now that the sentence has been updated it has a different voice than all the others. It still sounds fine. Just different.
@mike could you look into this please? Or at least let me know if it won’t be addressed so that I can plan accordingly?
When I type out my own sentences and put it in one of my private collections, keith22, I have no audio. Audio works fine if I add a Clozemaster sentence to the same collection (mine manually inputted no audio, CM has audio). This is on my PC, and I do not believe one can create or edit collections on their phone, just the browser version.
However, on my android phone…all sentences have audio. I enabled the text-to-speech output on my phone:
Go to settings / system / languages & input / text-to-speech output. You can activate speech output on your android phone from there (if you have an iPhone, do a google search on where to find the settings …as I did for my android phone)
(To note: this was for Spanish, hopefully Ukranian will work also but I’m not sure)
