Feature Request: Text To Speech For Imported Lessons

janelle.loves.language

United States

Feature Request: Text to Speech for Imported Lessons

February 2022

So I left a comment on the latest video talking about LingQ 5.0 and I got a response from Steve (the response to my comment is below).

However, I thought it would be best to ask here because I'm not sure he understood exactly what I want to do.

If LingQ 5.0 does not have this feature I would like to cancel my subscription because I absolutely need this feature for my studies.

I need to be able to generate TTS audio for the whole imported lesson

What I am looking for is the TTS audio player to be on the "Page View" mode, not the individual sentence mode so I have control to play whatever selection of the whole lesson that I want. I also need the ability to be able to slow down or speed up the TTS audio.

Apps like Speechify already do this, but they do not have Korean supported yet.

LingQ would even be better than Speechify if they could do this because there is also the ability to make LingQs.

But the most important thing to me is that I need the ability to hear what I'm reading (with the ability to do so at different speeds - x. 5, x.75 slower than normal speed)

Is this feature planned for anytime soon?

-Janelle

janelle.loves.language

United States

February 2022

Omg Omg Omg IT WORKS! On the app lol They should really highlight the differences between the functionality of the app vs. the website. Can’t wait till they bring this to the web view!

ColinJohnstonov

United Kingdom

February 2022

It would be a nice feature for the website. Previously this was maybe a bad idea because the TTS for full sentences was not particularly good, but since it is getting so much better for some languages it would be a nice feature.

Rolandosn

Austria

February 02 at 16:53

It works on the website as well but it is reading too fast.

ericb100

United States

February 02 at 17:50

You can change the speed setting.

Rolandosn

Austria

February 02 at 17:57

Yes but it does not sound that good. I upload an Spanish ebook an it would be great if it has the same audio like does from lingq. Is there a good software for text to speech?

ericb100

United States

February 02 at 21:01

Hi Rolandosn. I think, first of all, that at least on the website there are a few different voices you can choose from for Spanish. Possibly one of those sounds better?

In my opinion, for ebook...I usually look for the audiobook and purchase that. Then I will either listen to that separately, or I might read along in LingQ while listening to it using the Audible app (or whatever app you might use for audiobooks). So I generally try to choose a book that also has an audiobook.

The best text to speech in my opinion is on Microsoft Edge's immersive reader. It can be a bit of a pain though to get it to play something from your LingQ lesson.

To do this you can go into your lesson (on the web). Click the 3 dots at the upper right and click "Print Lesson". This will open it in plain text form in another tab. Then you can click the immersive reader symbol in the url box. This will read the text while also highlighting it where it is. You can also pick from a few different voices.

Most of these sound pretty good. Better than on LingQ as there is some pausing between sentences. It also doesn't seem to get tripped up when it encounters something that it doesn't know where in LingQ it seems to fall back to an English accent. Also for Spanish they have just about all the regional Spanish accents covered (don't know how good they are but definitely covers a variety).

You could also record this and upload it to Lingq as your audio for the lesson. I've used audacity to record these before, but you might try something else. Or simply just listen to it with the immersive reader if you are at your desktop.

ericb100

United States

February 2022

This is available on the Android app (used it this morning in fact) and on the iOS app as well. Just click on the headphone symbol on the bottom left. It may ask if you want to generate audio for the lesson, go ahead and do so. Then it will start playing in a listening "bar" at the bottom. If you click that it will open up "listening" mode where you can adjust speed (including .9x that someone was clamoring for on another thread...and your request speed of .75x). Also, the listening mode will show you the highlighted text that it is reading at that moment. Pretty nice.

This feature doesn't appear to be on the web version yet, but I'm pretty sure they were talking about getting it there as well. Just need to exercise some patience I think.

FrankG

United Kingdom

February 2022

Thanks Eric

Super ... Appreciate your feedback :-)

My comments were mainly directed at the pc web browser, and although I have Android app, most of my study is done with notebook laptop so I was not yet aware of that feature/functionality as such for lessons without any actual 'audio' at all. If I used Android it was always targetted for lessons with proper native audio, but now there is a bit more flexibility ...

I have just tried this with Android and it worked fine for me, and seems to link fine too for the auto scrolling!!! That's a real time saver for me, great news.

WIll hang in there hoprfully for the corresponding pc web version update.

Best regards, Frank

ericb100

United States

February 2022

Good to hear Frank. I have faith they'll add this to the web version as well unless there is a technical limitation for some reason. The web version beta was always behind the apps so to some degree it seems to get things after the apps do.

janelle.loves.language

United States

February 2022

Whoa I need to check that out…thanks!

davideroccato

Italy

February 2022

I'm not sure 100% but I thing they said they would do it for every text and it's in the progress but let's wait Zoran to tell you.

In the iOS I've seen that if I touch the audio icon on the bottom left there is a pop-up asking me if I want to generate automatic audio.

Anyway, I'm just curious, why do you like this feature and how do you use it? And at what language level do you think they are useful?

I usually don't like those mechanical voices, I find them quite horrible and don't help me much compared to having lessons with transcripts and native people audio. I could use them for a single phrase sometimes, or for a single word, just to have an idea of the sound that wasn't sure about but definitely not an entire text.

So, I'm curious about to know more for the future. Thanks.

ericb100

United States

February 2022

They've come a long way David. At least for some languages. I listening this morning to one of my lessons with the generated audio. It sounded pretty darn good imo (German). Sounding less and less mechanical. Give it a try if you haven't in awhile. It's not perfect, but it sounds less robotic I think than it has in the past.

davideroccato

Italy

February 2022

Thanks for the feedback. I'll give it another try then and see how it goes.

janelle.loves.language

United States

February 2022

Anyway, I'm just curious, why do you like this feature and how do you use it? And at what language level do you think they are useful?

Who me? One of my main ways to learn beginner languages is doing a cross-talk session with a native. You might not know what cross-talk is, but it doesn't really matter. The outcome of the lesson is a bunch of sentences created by the native that I want to read and listen to at the same time (for review purposes later in the week).

Sure I could record my lesson, but I don't want to hear my voice included as part of the audio when I play back. Editing that recording would just waste a bunch of time.

Hence, I just want to be able to simultaneously read and listen to my personal collection of example Korean sentences that I import as a lesson into LingQ - I mean as a whole (not sentence by sentence) And as a nice bonus - I wish to be able to change the speed of the TTS to my liking.

davideroccato

Italy

February 2022

Ok, interesting. Thanks for writing your learning strategy, sounds like something that could be quite useful in the future.

ericb100

United States

February 2022

Janelle,

If you need an intermediate solution for the web. You can try this website:

https://ttsmp3.com/

I see you are studying French, Korean and Chinese. It looks like it has all these. Not sure how good those may be, but the German one is quite good so hopefully comparable.

Anyway...there is a 375 word limit per day for "free". You can purchase 24 hr or whole year if I remember correctly. You can get the recording and download it to mp3 and then upload to Lingq. Still a fair amount of work, but maybe works a little better than google translate as it's not easy to actually extract the google translate audio into anything useful. The obvious limitation is the 375 word limit per day unless you are willing to fork some money. The pricing seems reasonable to me and I've almost bit a couple of times, but I have content coming out of my ears to in the end I didn't think it was worth it for me.

Or perhaps you could record the native speaker saying the sentences?

janelle.loves.language

United States

February 2022

It seems to be working now... not just in the app, but even on the web. I don't know when they fixed it, but today I logged on and uploaded a Chinese lesson and when I went to the playlist it actually played - highlighting each sentence! I'm very happy now :-)

JanFinster

Germany

February 2022

I do not get it: so, you just add a text lesson without audio to the playlist and then click play and it does the TTS? When I do this, it only works for lessons with audio included and it only plays the audio. For the lesson without the audio, the play button is gray (inactive). I am using Chrome.

davideroccato

Italy

February 2022

@JanFinster: on iOS, when you view the lesson, there is the audio icon on the left bottom. If you click it, a pop-up message is asking you if you want to generate an automatic audio lesson. And if you do, it does it for you.

On the web I don't see it yet.

ColinJohnstonov

United Kingdom

February 2022

Yeah and I think it does it using the iOS built-in TTS which explains why it is not available yet on the web. I also find for Russian at least that the TTS for an entire lesson generated by iOS is not very good. I would not want to listen to an entire text that way. Google has a really good TTS (not what you get from Google translate) but it is not free (changes by the character) so integrating it into LingQ would be unlikely, unless users can pay additionally for it somehow.

JanFinster

Germany

February 2022

Thank you Davide, but on PC, I do not see it (see pics).

https://ibb.co/ZSVZwRL

https://ibb.co/Kh3PZK2

davideroccato

Italy

February 2022

@JanFinster: yes, I think it's random on the Web version as they are implementing it step by step.

@Colin: I agree, I suppose it's something like this too. And I recently tried because @Eric suggested it but I didn't like it either. The problem is that it messes up any name or word that it's not part of the same language and it's very distracting when it happens.

ericb100

United States

February 2022

@David

I've tried it twice total =). First time sounded really good. Second time was not bad but sometimes a little clipped on some words or in between sentences.

Might be a difference in the content itself...i.e. maybe new stories it works a little better compared to a book or vice versa (can't remember what I listened to).

Also, I'm on Android so as someone was mentioning it may sound different on Android vs. iOS.

davideroccato

Italy

February 2022

@eric: :DD

It's not a big deal but it's true that it could sound different if as @Colin said, they are using the integrated OS system.

The problem is, on iOS, the same with SIRI (which is awful). If you have only one language is ok but if you start having name of people or streets or other words in different languages in the middle it becomes messy.

So the difference in the content, as you said, (+ the OS) does a very big difference so far.

PS: make a visit to my profile if you have time, I've just started to use it in a different way. You might find something useful.

ericb100

United States

February 2022

@David

Interesting. I like the idea of posting on your profile wall your activities. I take it this in response to the other thread regarding sharing what we are all doing. I like this. Maybe I will do this same with books and articles...in the past I've not shared articles as lessons due to requiring audio. I think that has or will be changing now that autogenerated audio is starting to happen. However, I may still stay gunshy as I'm not sure about copyright. But I can post what I'm reading in the profile and others can import on their own if they wish.

davideroccato

Italy

February 2022

@eric: exactly, it's an idea coming from that conversation. But I don't want to hijacked this thread on this. I'm sure we can find some interesting solution in the next weeks. ;)

FrankG

United Kingdom

February 2022

Hi Zoran / LingQ Team

I also agree that a TTS for the lesson as a 'whole' would be great.

I often import newspaper articles etc., and other material which does not have audio, and so I tend to create my own mp3 for the TTS voice either Google (or Windows Edge which is better quality for some languages) for most of those and add it directly as an mp3 file which is do-able but does really take a good chunk of time.

I tend to listen to the 'FULL' lesson audio rather than the sentence view audio, so it would be a great timesaver feature to have the complete lesson to listen to without having to go sentence by sentence, which isn't ideal for immersive listening.

Thank you,

Br, Frank

janelle.loves.language

United States

February 2022

Update: For anyone who is following this.... it's a terrible workaround but you can find tutorials online to download the audio directly from Google Translate and then upload that into your lesson on LingQ

I just wish you didn't have to waste time doing that though... I wish you could just directly play the lesson text as a whole with the speed you want.

JanFinster

Germany

February 2022

I am sure if you ever tried Microsoft Edge and its build-in read-aloud feature. You can use it for websites, PDFs and Lingq. If you read Lingq on Edge, then press shift+control+u and then you can choose voice (e.g. Korean) and speed. I think the TTS is even better than google translator (see pic: https://ibb.co/bKQzHWK)

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